Stuck on "Creating ext4 file system for /home"

Discussions about using Linux guests in VirtualBox.
Valeria
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Joined: 1. Jul 2022, 17:23

Re: Stuck on "Creating ext4 file system for /home"

Post by Valeria »

mpack wrote:To get the benefit of that you need to connect it to a USB3 port on the host PC (ideally avoid hubs to begin with), using a USB3 full spec cable.
Got it, connected it to a USB3 port on the host PC. Thankfully this new hard drive came with its own cable as well.

The new hard drive worked; I am guessing the previous hard drive had some formatting issue.

Thank you guys for the support, just for curiosity's sake I did leave that previous hard drive running for almost 3 days and it was just being really, really slow because the BytesWritten was increasing very slowly. Last checked it had written 112941056 bytes (after about 3 days). I still never did find the exact rate, but I guess that is a fun side project now.
fth0
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Re: Stuck on "Creating ext4 file system for /home"

Post by fth0 »

Valeria wrote:Last checked it had written 112941056 bytes (after about 3 days).
These values alone do not say much, because a running computer continuously writes small amounts of data to its system disk. More important is the behavior in the first hour. If you provided a zip file with the measurements, I'd take a look (also just for curiosity's sake).
mpack
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Re: Stuck on "Creating ext4 file system for /home"

Post by mpack »

Final notes then.

On my second post where I had reviewed your log, I asked for a description of the drive. You never gave me a full answer. You said "it's a 2TB drive", which doesn't tell me much. I'm not seeing where you confirmed other important details of the technology, brand, interface type etc. By the fact that you bought a new USB3 SSD I can gather that the old drive was not that. USB2 mechanical?

I also recommended 1024MB to the VM, not 2048MB. The latter was to be used only if you could make RAM available, which you have not. I don't agree with Scott that it's ok to ignore this. If you want long term stability then I'd still say, reduce to 1024MB or add more RAM to the host.
Valeria
Posts: 9
Joined: 1. Jul 2022, 17:23

Re: Stuck on "Creating ext4 file system for /home"

Post by Valeria »

mpack wrote: On my second post where I had reviewed your log, I asked for a description of the drive. You never gave me a full answer. You said "it's a 2TB drive", which doesn't tell me much. I'm not seeing where you confirmed other important details of the technology, brand, interface type etc. By the fact that you bought a new USB3 SSD I can gather that the old drive was not that. USB2 mechanical?
My sincere apologies. It is a hard drive I had bought a couple years ago, so I do not remember those details specifically nor do I know how to check them. I bought it off of amazon, though it appears that they removed the listing for it. The hard drive takes a USB-C cable, which makes me guess USB3 since I don't think USB2 has a USB-C port. I could be mistaken, and USB-C is a whole different thing though. It was an HDD drive as well. The 'file system' on it is set to NTFS. I had issues with that hard drive in the past with formatting and thought I had fixed them all since it was able to store files just fine after messing with it. I couldn't tell you exactly what I did to it in fixing it because that was about a year ago.
mpack wrote:I also recommended 1024MB to the VM, not 2048MB. The latter was to be used only if you could made RAM available, which you have not. I don't agree with Scott that it's ok to ignore this. If you want long term stability then I'd still say, reduce to 1024MB or add more RAM to the host.
I thought I had made the RAM available at the time, since when I opened task manager and had the machine running, it said only 4.8GB-ish used while I had the VM open with 2048 (going off of memory). In the long term, I probably will add more RAM when possible.
fth0 wrote:These values alone do not say much, because a running computer continuously writes small amounts of data to its system disk. More important is the behavior in the first hour. If you provided a zip file with the measurements, I'd take a look (also just for curiosity's sake).
Sure thing, I think this is about 5-10 minutes into the installation already. Each entry is logged every 10 minutes. If you want more data just let me know. See attached.
Attachments
VM-Statistics-.zip
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Last edited by Valeria on 10. Jul 2022, 21:37, edited 1 time in total.
fth0
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Re: Stuck on "Creating ext4 file system for /home"

Post by fth0 »

VM-Statistics-2.txt wrote:
2022-07-04 23:13:32.366000
<Counter c="   21,746,176" unit="bytes" vis="used" name="/Public/Storage/AHCI0/Port0/BytesRead"/>
<Counter c="1,110,573,568" unit="bytes" vis="used" name="/Public/Storage/AHCI0/Port0/BytesWritten"/>
<Counter c="  530,003,968" unit="bytes" vis="used" name="/Public/Storage/PIIX3IDE0/Port2/BytesRead"/>
[...]
2022-07-05 16:33:36.919000
<Counter c="   21,803,520" unit="bytes" vis="used" name="/Public/Storage/AHCI0/Port0/BytesRead"/>
<Counter c="1,112,244,736" unit="bytes" vis="used" name="/Public/Storage/AHCI0/Port0/BytesWritten"/>
<Counter c="  547,481,600" unit="bytes" vis="used" name="/Public/Storage/PIIX3IDE0/Port2/BytesRead"/>
Up to the first measurement, ~500 MB have been read from the ISO and ~1 GB has been written to the virtual disk image. The former is a typical amount for booting from the ISO, so I'd make an educated guess that the copying of the data during installation never took place and the speed of the target disk didn't play a role. If I'd assume that you measured a copying phase instead of idling, reading ~17 MB and writing ~2 MB during ~17 hours would be magnitudes slower than any USB standard ever written and only indicate a damaged device.
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