Hello Alan!
I've now plugged the same IDE disk into the real IDE port and it's fine.
For me good to hear that the ext2fs is ok.
Well, I've got a new IDE drive with an ACARD 7720u SCSI->IDE bridge that was hooked up to the SCSI chain. The drive appears to work fine with GEM, but as soon as you use ext2 on it, then I get bad filesystem corruptions.
Are you absolutely sure that there is now problem if you use a FAT32 partition for example? (FAT16 is limited to 2 GB)
The FAT filesystem is very simple and work very simple compared to the ext2 fs. The (critical) FAT tables are for example located at the beginning of the partition. Also the FAT fs fill up the drive from the beginning to the end (Btw. that's the reason why FAT32 is getting slower and slower as larger the partition is; accessing the FAT need expensive seeks).
The ext2 fs spread the data and metadata over the complete partition while filling up the drive (for speed reasons, keep data and metadata close together to avoid expensive seek operations).
Regards, Frank -- ATARI FALCON 060 // MILAN 060 ----------------------------- http://sparemint.org/ e-Mail: fnaumann@boerde.de