Full format?

[camaro71633]

I am attempting to install gentoo stage 3 on a sparcstation 10. When I try to unpack the tarball it stops with a i/o error. I beleve i amgetting this error becouse of bad sectors on the harddrive. So my question is how do you do a format that checks for bad sectors?

[Modorf]

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 -- this will format the hda1 partion as ext3

fsck /dev/hda1 -- this will verify the partion for you.

[camaro71633]

Thanks for the info i tried that but now i get a unexpected EOF gess it must be a bad d/l or burn maybe ill try a stage one install :D .

[DMR]

Originally posted by camaro71633
gess it must be a bad d/l or burn That sounds more likely than bad blocks on the drive.

[camaro71633]

Well I knew the drive had bad sectors, they showed up when i had windows on it in another box. I checked the md5 and burned the disk at 4x so i thought it was ok. gess not :(

[DMR]

Originally posted by camaro71633
Well I knew the drive had bad sectors, they showed up when i had windows on it in another box. Ohhhh- I see. In light of that, and the fact that you verified the d/l and burn, perhaps bad blocks are the problem. If the partition is formatted as ext2 or ext3, you might want to run the "badblocks" program to map them out. read the man pages for the badblocks and e2fsck programs for more information on that.

[camaro71633]

Sorry for the delay but I got the box going. Not with gentoo though :( . I installed RedHat 6.2 instead. I got the tarball to decompress but then i got errors running emerge-sync. I have not given up on gentoo altogether though I am going to try to install it on a P2 I have lying around :) .