I have a 1 TB WD external drive that I intend to use for backups for my Linux machine. I have formated my drive using GPT with ext4. Everytime I plug my drive in my system it says it is connected and it doesn't spin, but as soonly as I mount the drive at i.e /mnt/backup it starts spinning and blinking constantly. What could be causing this problem? The drive isn't being used by anything / anyone.
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1It must be used for something to start working like this. Do you have any sort of disk indexing product installed? Or antivirus scan?– harrymcCommented Jan 26, 2018 at 16:26
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No. I don't have almost anything installed. I am thinking whether it could be the journaling system of the ext4 file system? I do not have the same problem with my other NTFS hard drive.– Paul HaunCommented Jan 26, 2018 at 17:07
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1 Answer
If you have very recently formatted the drive, this might just be Linux completing the creation of the index node, also called the Internal nodes of the extent tree.
Since the complete formatting of a large partition could take a while and therefore delay the formatting process, Linux postpones this part of it and completes it later in a background job, usually a process called ext4lazyinit.
You could just carry on with other tasks without significant delays and let this process complete eventually. If this process gets interrupted, then Linux will continue it on the next mount. This will happen again and again, until the whole ‘index node’ is created. So in theory, there is nothing to worry about.
If you would like this process to finish and prefer reformatting the disk while waiting for the initialization to finish, use this command :
sudo mkfs -t ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/<dev-id>
You may also enter a volume label by adding the parameter
-L <label>.
For more information, see the article My Newly Formatted (‘Ext4’) External Hard Disk is Busy, Even at Idle.
