cannot use 2TB external USB drive ...

[Aditya Sarawgi]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 12:19:11PM -0700, George Sanders wrote:
> 
> 
> 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 ?
> 

With that block size you can create a partition of about 16 TiB though I 
have never tried creating one. Can you provide a crash dump ? This might 
help 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug.html

Also feel free to file a pr about this. I don't have the necessary 
resources to confirm this. Can anybody reproduce this and provide a 
dump, please ?

--
Aditya Sarawgi