I have a LaCie 500GB/firewire drive, and I've been at this thing all day. Took me awhile to get the firewire/fedora to actually see it and seems the only things that have worked: mkinitrd --with=sd_mod --with=sbp2 --with=raw1394 /boot/initrd-2.6.12-1.1400_FC5.img 2.6.12-1.1400_FC5 /etc/rc.local /sbin/modprobe sbp2 serialize_io=1 Currently trying: mkfs.ext3 -v -O sparse_super -O dir_index -R stride=8 -N 120000000 -j -F /dev/sda1 Everything I have done has not work, I tried xfs too. Currently as this is formating I see this in dmesg $ dmesg | tail sda: Current: sense key: No Sense Additional sense: No additional sense information sda: Current: sense key: No Sense Additional sense: No additional sense information sda: Current: sense key: No Sense Additional sense: No additional sense information sda: Current: sense key: No Sense Additional sense: No additional sense information sda: Current: sense key: No Sense Additional sense: No additional sense information I assume this is going to suck and explode too. Anyone have any tips what-so-ever for formating a LARGE slice? This was supposed to backup my raid5 server but so far, I can't even use it and it took me long enough to get Fedora to see it. Or I can give up, hand it to my wife, format it with ntfs and let her use it directly to backup her photo work. (really really don't want to do that)