I use syncback, also.

rsync, Chris? What, you're just too effing lazy to write your own perl scripts or something?

I tried implementing rsync on a Linux box I was building once - fortunately, JP says that, between the drugs and the therapy, I should be employable again within a couple years.

Real men write assembly.

54% of a 2 TB drive (as the manufacturer counts) is probably 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. I'm wondering if something is hanging up at 1 TiB.



Perl is too high-level. I never use anything more than C or BASH. The only assembly I know is for the Zilog Z80, and the IBM Cell processor in the PS3 (yeah, I skipped a few generations).

Fortunately, I never said that Chris wasn't a real man.

Also, I am in no way a real man under that criterion.

Yeah, me neither. I was just trying to join in the geek banter.

If Chris were a "real man" he'd be using tcsh, not bash.

I'm not a "real man", either.

I've tried tcsh, while the scripting is nice (being I'm most familiar with the C language), I don't write many scripts I keep. I'm more of a

for foo in $(seq -w 0 999); do touch bar-$foo; done

on the command line type of guy.

I did try using bash in vi command mode before. That's kind of interesting, but also not really needed.

This is probably an issue with your SATA controller. If you have an Nvidia (nForce) motherboard then try updating to the latest drivers for it.

Hey Guys, I’m hanging my head in shame again, because I hate relying on you guys for what should be simple computer things. This is really, really frustrating me, though, and I can’t find an answer.

I bought a WD Black Caviar 2TB SATA bare internal drive for my Photoshop computer (Dell, running Vista 32). The steps I took for installation were:

- After physically installing it (power and Sata cable), under disk management I initialized it (MBR).
- I right-clicked the graphic area representing the drive, and clicked format. I left the whole drive as a single partition, made sure it was NTFS, and changed the drive letter to “Z”. The format continued until it reached 54% then it hung.
- Upon Henry’s recommendation, I made sure all drivers were up to date.
- Western Digital recommended I download and use a utility (Data LifeGuard) to check the drive. I did a quicktest, and this (also) seemed to have progressed but then stop at the roughly half way point. The final result was something along the lines of “too many bad sectors”.
- My assumption was now that this was indeed a bad drive.
- I RMA’d another in advance, and it arrived yesterday.
- I followed all the same steps with the exact same results.

Now I’m obviously thinking that the first drive was not bad, because it would be too much of a coincidence to have a second drive fail in exactly the same way.

I’m beginning to think: was I wrong in thinking I don’t need jumpers? Was it supposed to be quick formatted BEFORE initializing or something? Do drives not like the letter Z?

There are four SATA jacks on my MB. Are they different? Should I go through the entire procedure with a different SATA connection?

I have no idea what’s going on, but I now have two drives that are both useless and I’ve had WAY too much downtime that I can’t afford right now, over something that should have been very simple.

I’m frustrated because I feel like I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t find what.

I would be very, very grateful for any ideas that anyone has.

Try updating the SATA controller driver or running the drive on another machine if possible and formating it there.