major partition problem (Page 1 of 2)

what version of gparted? where are your saved details? Is there any particular reason this is posted in livemedia and not in gparted? what is the output of fdisk -lu <device> and parted print...

etc etc..

yep, if you save it to your temporary root in memory you'll loose if after a reboot
We like to keep livemedia and gpartedproblems separate and it's a bit up to the user to determine where a topic should go. In this case it seems you have issues with gparted and not with the livemedia, so i'm going to move it.

About help.. i'll read your post later in more detail, but without these details it's very hard to say what went wrong.

can we have the output of fdisk and parted as i requested in my previous post? thnx!

otherwise (And actually i prefer that) you could use the livecd to get us this data.

#fdisk -lu /dev/<yourharddrive>
#parted /dev/<yourharddrive> (and after hint "p", like "print")

exactly the drive you use e.g. : /dev/hda or /dev/hde or /dev/sda or /dev/whateveryouuse
if you dont know, type /dev/hd and then hint "tab" key, it will return all the possibilities .

Well that's the thing. When I run gparted, it just shows my entire hard drive as unallocated space. There are no partitions shown (no /dev/hda, etc.), so that's why I'm confused. My Windows partition is obviously still there, at 47GB, because I still use it as normal. But gparted isn't detecting anything.

I'm sorry, I'm not as advanced with all this stuff. Do I run these commands from the terminal within the GParted Live CD? How do I save all this output and then access it later to show you?

Ok, here we go. I hope this sheds some light, because it means nothing to me. And like I said before, I should have a total of 5 partitions (Windows, Linux, /home, shared and swap).

This is the result of fdisk -lu:

---------------------
root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: invalid flag 0x010c of partition table 6 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *          63    99731519    49865728+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2        99731520   117210239     8739360    5  Extended
/dev/hda5        99731583   114061499     7164958+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6   ?  2083267318  4035807077   976269880   6f  Unknown

Disk /dev/sda: 257 MB, 257949696 bytes
8 heads, 63 sectors/track, 999 cylinders, total 503808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63      503807      251872+   e  W95 FAT16 (LBA)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(998, 7, 63) logical=(999, 4, 60)
------------------------

This is fdisk -lu /dev/hda1:

------------------------
root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu /dev/hda1

Disk /dev/hda1: 51.0 GB, 51062505984 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6207 cylinders, total 99731457 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1p1   ?   218129509  1920119918   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda1p2   ?   729050177  1273024900   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda1p3   ?   168653938   168653938           0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda1p4      2692939776  2692991410       25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
-------------------------

And this is fdisk -lu /dev/hda5:

-----------------------------
root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu /dev/hda5

Disk /dev/hda5: 7336 MB, 7336917504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 891 cylinders, total 14329917 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/hda5 doesn't contain a valid partition table
---------------------------------

For some reason, doing fdisk on hda2 and hda6 produced no results.

Also, here is a link to a screenshot of what GParted shows when it reads my paritions:

http://johnjsalerno.com/gparted.jpeg

Ok, here you go:

root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu /dev/hda
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: invalid flag 0x010c of partition table 6 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *          63    99731519    49865728+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2        99731520   117210239     8739360    5  Extended
/dev/hda5        99731583   114061499     7164958+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6   ?  2083267318  4035807077   976269880   6f  Unknown

---------------------

root@GParted:~# parted /dev/hda
GNU Parted 1.7.1
Using /dev/hda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                           
Error: Invalid partition table on /dev/hda -- wrong signature 10c.       
Ignore/Cancel? ignore                                                     

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
1      32.3kB  51.1GB  51.1GB  primary   ntfs         boot
2      51.1GB  60.0GB  8949MB  extended                   
5      51.1GB  58.4GB  7337MB  logical   ext3         

-----------------

Also, here's another screenshot, but this time with "Device Information" on the left side:
http://johnjsalerno.com/gparted.jpeg

well, all i can say now is that /dev/hda6 is completely wrong, it starts and ends on a place far outside the disk. The reason you can see it in parted is because there you can press ignore, something that's not possible in gparted (yet).
Maybe i should try to read invalid partitiontables as well, but first i'd like to know what the consequences will be.

did you try removing /dev/hda6 ?

use fdisk

something like this should suffice:
fdisk /dev/hda
(press 'd')
(enter '6')
(press 'w')

good luck

Ok, I did what you said and deleted hda6, but nothing seems to have changed. Refreshing the view in GParted still gives me the "unallocated" entry for the entire hard drive. So I'm beginning to wonder, even if I delete the other partitions using fdisk, it seems like I still won't be able to add that space back to the Windows partition with GParted (unless it suddenly starts working properly again). Can fdisk be used to do this part as well?

Thanks.