So, the hard disk in my webserver appears to be going south. I've turned on SMART monitoring, but nothing obvious appears at this point.

At the same time, I've been running a little short of disk space on that box (nothing spectacular -- there's still about 10Gb free), so I bought a shiny new 200Gb Barracuda to go in the box.

And I'm having trouble formatting it. I can plug it in fine, and I can partition it fine -- I opted for 7Gb root, 500Mb swap, the rest /home. Now, when I try to format /home using mke2fs -j -O sparse_super, it hangs the box solid at the last step -- "writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information".

Any ideas?

This is on Debian/woody, btw, so e2fstools is, like, 1.27 from 2002 or something. Do I just need to format the disk with a newer version of mke2fs?

Oh, and kernel 2.4.26.