[ale] Did WD15EARX consume my weekend?

[PairOfTwins]

Anyone:

This was home server upgrade weekend, I thought.   Bought a WD15EARX on 
sale, installed Zentyal, and found after an apparently successful 
installation, that the partition with the OS on it had pages of errors, 
according to e2fsck.

Next 2 installations failed during "Select and install software" step, 
both stable and beta versions, though both CDs passed the iso verify check.

I had partitioned ahead of time with fdisk and each start sector was 
evenly divisible by 8.

Then I installed a freshly verified burn of Ubuntu Server 12.04 using 
those same partitions.

When finished the alignment was whacked:

root at PartedMagic:~# fdisk -lu /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000ad2bd
    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048     2930687     1464320   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2   *     2930688    31602687    14336000   83  Linux
/dev/sda3        31604734  2930276351  1449335809    5  Extended
Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5        31604736    34471935     1433600   83  Linux
/dev/sda6        34473984  2041513983  1003520000   83  Linux
/dev/sda7      2041516032  2930276351   444380160   83  Linux
root at PartedMagic:~#


Plus e2fsck showed a page of errors on the OS partition sda2, whose 
alignment looks OK, though I had to force a check, as it thought it was 
clean.

root at PartedMagic:~# e2fsck /dev/sda2
e2fsck 1.42.2 (27-Mar-2012)
UbuntuSvr: clean, 55618/897600 files, 364573/3584000 blocks
root at PartedMagic:~# e2fsck -f /dev/sda2
e2fsck 1.42.2 (27-Mar-2012)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Entry '.' in 
/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-23-generic/include/config/usb/whci (398464) 
has an incorrect filetype (was 42, should be 2).
Fix<y>? yes
Entry 'hcd.h' in 
/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-23-generic/include/config/usb/whci (398464) 
has an incorrect filetype (was 33, should be 1).
Fix<y>? yes
Entry '.' in ??? (398477) has an incorrect filetype (was 14, should be 2).
Fix<y>? yes
Entry '..' in ??? (398477) has invalid inode #: 705041315.
Clear<y>? yes
Entry 'elan.h' in ??? (398477) has an incorrect filetype (was 9, should 
be 1).
Fix<y>? yes
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
'..' in /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-23-generic/include/config/usb/ftdi 
(398477) is ??? (705041315), should be 
/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-23-generic/include/config/usb (398243).
Fix<y>? yes
Error while adjusting inode count on inode 0
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Inode 398243 ref count is 42, should be 41.  Fix<y>? yes
Pass 5: Checking group summary information

UbuntuSvr: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
UbuntuSvr: 55618/897600 files (0.2% non-contiguous), 364573/3584000 blocks
root at PartedMagic:~#

BTW the SMART error log is always clean.

I'm tired of googling, and ready for a fresh set of eyes to tell me what 
I'm missing here!

Tom