1 Topic by balta (edited by balta 2011-08-15 13:04:36)

  • balta
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Topic: [SOLVED] GPT issue when creating new partition on USB drive

Hi there!
So, I had this old 4Gigs usb drive of mine I found and it was all cluttered with random data and quite a few partitions (I think I used it to try out ChromeOS builds by hexxeh) so I just deleted everything from GParted: now I have a bare, completely unallocated drive (/dev/sdb) with its 3.75 Gigs of space.

I now want to make a single one big partition (ext2, ext3, fat16, fat32 ... I don't care) but every thing I try gives me this error

GParted 0.6.2

Libparted 2.3

Create Primary Partition #1 (ext3, 3.74 GiB) on /dev/sdb  00:00:01    ( ERROR )
        create empty partition  00:00:00    ( ERROR )
        libparted messages    ( INFO )
                Not all of the space available to /dev/sdb appears to be used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 3866588 blocks) or continue with the current setting?
                Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition.
========================================

The only strange thing I noticed is that when I choose the size it lefts empty the first MegaByte and there is no way to make the partition start from zero.

Any clues? Thankyou!

EDIT: Yup, solved by my self just after writing the post.
From Menu Bar: Device > Create Partition Table > msdos
Then the creation of the partition worked just fine.
Was it the right way to do it? Was msdos the right choice?
Thanks, hope this helps someone!

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: [SOLVED] GPT issue when creating new partition on USB drive

It sounds as if you previously had a GPT partition table.  With GPT there is a primary partition table at the front of the drive and a backup partition table at the back of the drive.  If the partition table was copied from another device (i.e., using "dd") then you would need to use parted from the command line so that the GPT partition table could be adjusted to recognize all of the disk space.

As you discovered, replacing the partition table with another will also work (assuming you don't need any of the data on the drive).