Recently I purchased a Cubietruck Cubieboard 3, and I'm trying to copy Lubuntu server from the builtin NAND memory to a hard disk.
I can create a partition successfully, but when I go to format the partition with ext4, using mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1, I get a bunch of errors, which all look the same:
Writing inode tables: done
Creating Journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information:
[ 815.XXXXXX] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 815.XXXXXX] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000000
[ 815.XXXXXX] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 815.XXXXXX] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:08:1c/00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in
[ 815.XXXXXX] res 41/40:00:02:08:1c/00:00:00:00/60 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
[ 815.XXXXXX] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 815.XXXXXX] ata1.00: error: { UNC }
[...] above 7 lines repeated 5x, each with a 6 second time difference
[ 845.XXXXXX] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 1837058
I don't think it is the drive, because it is new, and I can also format it on Elementary (Ubuntu). If I format it from Elementary, I can then not mount it on my Cubieboard.
Emask 0x409 (media error)seems to be a drive problem. If you have direct access to the drive you should run DFT on it (can be found on UBCD - ultimatebootcd.com). If it passes a full advanced test then try disabling the drive cache (as dumb as that sounds). – Deryck Jul 4 '14 at 15:53