Infinite loop mounting disk

[Michael]

Hi,

I had an old disk lying around and thought I put it in with my existing
Ubuntu system. I used fdisk to create just one partition.
It worked for a while but I found out that there was lots of old stuff on it
so I did an "rm -rf" on the disk (since I don't know the *NIX-equivalent of
format, though now I think I could've just mv'ed it to /dev/null, but
anyways...) only now I can't mount the disk anymore.

I'm getting continuously looping error messages on # mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1
/data, namely
hdb: task_out_intr: status = 0x61 {DriveReady DeviceFault Error}
hdb: task_out_intr: status = 0x61 {DriveStatusError}
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ide: reset: succes
and back to the first line. I have no control over the system anymore, hard
reset is the only option.

There's no important data on the disk anyway, so any solution you can come
up with other than "smash it with a hammer" (i.o.w.: that will keep the disk
intact) I'll try.

Thanks in advance

Kind regards

Michael.

[Tom Clydesdale]

"Michael" <mischa.tbaINSERTATHERExs4all.nl> wrote in message
news:44675650$0$31637$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl...

> Hi,
>
> I had an old disk lying around and thought I put it in with my existing
> Ubuntu system. I used fdisk to create just one partition.
> It worked for a while but I found out that there was lots of old stuff on
> it so I did an "rm -rf" on the disk (since I don't know the
> *NIX-equivalent of format, though now I think I could've just mv'ed it to
> /dev/null, but anyways...) only now I can't mount the disk anymore.
>
> I'm getting continuously looping error messages on # mount -t ext3
> /dev/hdb1 /data, namely
> hdb: task_out_intr: status = 0x61 {DriveReady DeviceFault Error}
> hdb: task_out_intr: status = 0x61 {DriveStatusError}
> ide: failed opcode was: unknown
> ide: reset: succes
> and back to the first line. I have no control over the system anymore,
> hard reset is the only option.
>
> There's no important data on the disk anyway, so any solution you can come
> up with other than "smash it with a hammer" (i.o.w.: that will keep the
> disk intact) I'll try.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Kind regards
>
> Michael.
>

Try mkfs (make a file system) - get the instructions from man mkfs. I would
be a little more specific but i'm currently working on a Windows sytsem.
Good luck. (O'Reilly has a pocket guide of essential commands which would
seem to enhance your knowledge level.)

Tom