[gentoo-user] external usb hard drive problem

[Stefan Riha]

Hi!

Yesterday I bought an external hard drive (lacie, 250 GB, usb 2.0).
I did 
>fdisk /dev/sda1
and created a single primary partition.
this creates /dev/sda1p1 or something like that.
(could my problem have to do with the fact that I didn't do
>fdisk /dev/sda
instead? I mean, without the 1 at the end of the line?)

Then I did 
>mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
>mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/external

and it worked.
Now the problem is that when I copy data from my computers hard drive to
the external drive, the process often hangs up. In KDE's copy process 
window appears "stalled".
This happens even more often if I copy from another external hard drive on
my external hard drive. Both of these hang on the USB 2 pci card with four 
slots.
When these two things happen, the green light on the ext. harddrive (ehd) is burning.
That means it's working on something.
If I try to unmount the ehd, it doesn't work of course, because the copying
process is still active. If I kill this process with
>kill -9 PID
it can't be killed.
The only thing I can think of is 
>shutdown
The real big problem is that I cannot remount the ehd again. 
When I do 
>mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/external
there is no error message, but the process is never terminated.
The cursor jumps to the next line and nothing happens,
except that the green light on the ehd starts burning.
Seems like the Filesystem is destroyed? If I do 
>fdisk /dev/sda1
there is a line telling about some flag that will be removed when
I press w(rite). I'm sorry, my computer isn't connected to the net,
so I can't give you the exact messages.

Did I use the right format (ext3)?
What's the command for formating in xfs?
I use genkernel 2.4 (and don't want to upgrade), is that part of the problem?

Thanks for the help,
 --Stefan

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