Hardware :: External USB Drive - Mkfs Hangs / Solution For This?

I have a 1TB external USB drive that I'm having a lot of trouble with.

First I created a 500G partition, then formatted it with ext3. That went as expected.

Then I tried to copy a large (~50G) archive to it, and at about 13G it just stopped. I was using "watch" to view the progress, and it just stopped suddenly. I left it for quite a while, to see if it was actually doing something, just slowly, but nothing.

I tried to kill the copy command, but it wouldn't die. I killed the parent processes, and it just kept moving up the process tree until init was its parent. I tried rebooting.. I got the message "system is going down for reboot now", then the first few messages of the reboot process, and then it just stopped at "unmounting local filesystems". Again, I left it for a while, nothing. I ended up hard booting it.

After rebooting, I recreated the partition, then tried formatting it. This time it started writing inode tables, then just stopped at a certain point. I think at 133/4001. Again, I left it for a while and it didn't move.

Again, I tried killing the process and it moved up the tree until init was its parent. Rebooting hung at the same place, and again had to hard boot it.

This time I deleted the partition and tried creating a small partition - 500M. mkfs formatted it as expected, and I was able to mount and write to the partition.

I deleted the small partition, and tried creating a larger one - 100G this time. fdisk created the partition just fine (and did not complain or report any errors through this whole process), but again mkfs gets stuck.. this time at 34/801 inode tables. I haven't been timing it, but I want to say it's been at least 10 - 15 minutes.

dmesg reports some drive errors, but I'm not sure what they mean code...