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I have a 20TB (4x5TB) RAID5 aray (please hold comments about RAID5, I know a lot of people don't like it) that I recently setup, through Webmin, on 18.04.3LTS ubuntu server.

I am not creating the filesystem (through Webmin) and it seems to be taking a very long time - it's been going (I think) for at least 24 hours now.

The command Webmin runs is

Executing command partprobe ; mkfs -t ext4 -c -q /dev/md0 ..

Since running, I am just getting the equivalent of the pinwheel - there is no progress bar to indicate if it's still actually working or has stalled.

In the 'Running Process' section of Webmin, the following two are at the top of the list

27638   root    12.7 %  [md0_raid5]
21798   root    10.4 %  badblocks -b 4096 -X /dev/md0 3662728703

I suspect maybe I ticked an option for it to check the array for badblocks, while creating filesystem, which might slow it down considerably? but I don't know what I don't know here. Additionally, the activity LED on the drives are showing constant activity.

I am guessing this all means it's still progressing, but I was hoping there may be a command to run that may give me a progress indication? or may someone has completed a similar process and can give me an indication of how long I should wait before quitting and staring over?

UPDATE: this thread suggest it's badblocks and I'll probably be waiting 400+ hours...

If so, is there a way to kill the badblock process and have it just finish off the mkfs.ext4? Else, what commands should I run to start it again with just filesytem creation?

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killed the badblock process (through the webmin process manager GUI). Didn't seem to cause an issue with the file-system as I was able to mount it (again, though the webmin raid manager GUI), so am assuming badblock and mkfs (filesystem creation) run independent of each other.

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  • Can you explain a little more which commands / steps you had done to solve your issue? Please edit your answer
    – damadam
    Dec 10, 2019 at 8:20

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