I just had a 500 GB IDE hard drive installed in my server. I created a partition and ran mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1. Does anyone have an idea of how long it will take to finish? Also, my ssh session got disconnected while it was being formatted. Do you think that will be a problem? It still seems to be going though...

Thank you.

Btw, I'm extremely pleased by the time it took to get a quotes for the new hard, the time it took to install it after I approved the upgrade, and the constant updates to my ticket to let me know what was going on. Thanks The Planet!

I wouldnt use it unless you could successfully finish a mke2fs. If ssh keeps getting disconnected, use a screen session... if you dont have screen installed... up2date screen(or yum install screen).

Once it is installed type "screen". You will still be at a bash prompt after you type that, then go ahead and start making the filesystem. Once that is started hold ctrl and press "a", then press "d", and release ctrl. That will detach you from the screen session... in other words you can log out and it wont disrupt anything.

When you are ready to reattach to the session, log back into the server, and type "screen -r".

Thanks for the advice about screen. When I used it, I could see that the drive wasn't formatting properly but the process was still running for hours making my iowait constantly at 99%. Tried to do a fsck, but it wouldn't work. I put in a ticket and they did some tests and found that the drive was bad. You guys quickly replaced it and now I'm up and running again.