1 Topic by sfabius

  • sfabius
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  • Registered: 2007-03-01
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Cannot access new external hard drive

I have a new 60Gb WD Passport external hard drive.
It comes with one big FAT32 partition
I had gparted shrink this to about 10Gb, and had intended to use the rest for ext3 (I'm primarily a linux user).
This operation failed, now I cannot do anything to the disk and I am at a loss.
The disk is found but all operations are greyed out.

Here is the error when I start gparted:

miles# gparted /dev/sda
======================
libparted : 1.7.1
======================
Unable to open /dev/sda - unrecognised disk label.

cfdisk (which is what I have used in the past but thought gparted could save me a step by shrinking) gives this response:

miles# cfdisk /dev/sda
(BLANK TERMINAL SCREEN)
FATAL ERROR: Cannot read disk drive
Press any key to exit cfdisk

I would love to get this back, I don't care what happened, and I have no data to worry about (there wasn't anything on it). Please help!

2 Reply by LarryT

  • LarryT
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  • From: France (Bretagne)
  • Registered: 2006-07-31
  • Posts: 1,230

Re: Cannot access new external hard drive

Hm, since both fdisk and parted return errors, i guess the problem comes from your drive ....

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)