cannot use 2TB external USB drive ...

[George Sanders]

I bought a western digital 2TB USB external drive - shows up in dmesg as:

da2 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da2: <WD 20EADS External 1.75> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device 
da2: 40.000MB/s transfers
da2: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 243201C)

Originally I tried to simply use it right off as a FAT32 device.  However, this crashed my system after generating thousands of:

g_vfs_done():da0s4[READ(offset=0, length=2048)]error = 5
g_vfs_done():da0s4[READ(offset=32768, length=2048)]error = 5

So I wiped the disk and recreated it in sysinstall using sysid 6 (msdos) and newfs_msdos ... my thought was that maybe western digital had some weird layouts or boot partitions, etc., and maybe I just needed to start with a clean slate.

I got the same result.

So finally, I gave up and since the end user of this system CANNOT use ufs2 (which is what I would prefer anyway) I installed the ext2 tools and made an ext2 volume:

# mke2fs /dev/da2s1
mke2fs 1.41.8 (11-Jul-2009)
Filesystem label=
OS type: FreeBSD
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
122101760 inodes, 488378000 blocks
24418900 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
14905 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
        102400000, 214990848

Writing inode tables:

This mke2fs operation completed successfully and I mounted the drive and began using it.

I filled it up to just about the 1 TB level, and the system crashes.  No errors, no output, nothing - just freezes up requiring a reset button.  Note that my 4k block size in the mke2fs above does NOT imply a 1 TB filesystem size limit for ext2.



So what am I doing wrong ?


Again, I would love to just newfs this to ufs2, but the end user cannot use that - fat32 and ext2 are my only options...


Is this drive just too big for freebsd to handle over USB ?