1 Topic by rafaelous

  • rafaelous
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Topic: Entire HDD showing up as unallocated space.

I've been having a problem with my HDD in my PC all along, only now I'm actually doing something about it. Basically Windows works fine (I'm dual booting Vista and 7) and I can mess around with my partitions in the partition editor whatever it's called in windows. However I now want to install linux so this is a major problem for me. I got out a Ubuntu 9 LiveCD, and opened GParted to make a new partition before installing it. When i opened GParted the HDD showed as unallocated space, the whole thing!

There was a guy who was helping me out on an IRC channel earlier, but then he had to go so i was wondering if anyone here could help me with it? This is basically what I went through with him before and where I'm at now.

I opened terminal and typed:

sudo fsck /dev/sda

I got back from it this:

fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
fsck.ext2: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

I'm not sure what that means or what to do now, so I would be grateful if anyone could help me with it.

2 Reply by class413

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Re: Entire HDD showing up as unallocated space.

Getting "Unallocated space" for a working disk, means that the ubuntu livecd didn't understand correctly the hard drive or the partition table (unless there are more than one HD drives on the system and you selected the wrong one).
Please, try to use the latest stable GParted livecd. It is always up to date. The Ubuntu install cd usually contains some more or less older version.

(Moved to the Live Media section).

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by cmdr

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Re: Entire HDD showing up as unallocated space.

Hello rafaelous,

your project is NOT that easy as you might think. In a worst case scenario you have to recover your harddisk from scratch. So your first concern should be to backup all, what you don't want to loose. A very good idea would be to create a (compressed) image of your present running harddisk first ( with "Clonezilla" for example; on a separate storage medium, of course !). If anything goes wrong, you are rather quickly back to start with nothing more trouble than a little loss of time.

There are much pitfalls, which might corrupt your project, if you don't know and respect them. So your first task would be to analyze (with our help !) your present partitioning scheme and to describe exactly, how much space every partition should have. Ubuntu creates three new partitions, when installed, overwrites Master Boot Record and may or may not integrate both Windows versions into its bootmanager Grub. If these new partitions are created at the wrong place, both Windows versions may have gone forever, especially if Ubuntu sees nothing but unallocated space ! Both Windows versions probably use NTFS file system, so it's a MUST to use latest stable "GParted Live" version !.

In other words : it's easier for us to prevent you from falling into a trap than to help you out there. Depending on our (both) skills, it might take a little bit longer than for someone doing it straight forward, but safety counts !

VERY IMPORTANT : if you need your system professionally for your daily work, I would strongly advise against doing such experiments ! And you should NEVER loose your internet access; so a second system is a MUST (may be another Linux Live system; probably Ubuntu does the job, just try it).

If you agree my proposal, let's start !

Regards
cmdr

4 Reply by rafaelous

  • rafaelous
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Re: Entire HDD showing up as unallocated space.

Thanks guys for your input. I was speaking to a friend earlier today who's an IT expert and he had a look at it. Turns out that RAID 0 was turned on and only Windows had the drivers or something for it so everything else was detecting it as 2 seperate HDD's and that was where I was having a problem. I backed up the stuff I wanted to keep and switched it off, reinstalled Windwos and all and it's all doing fine now, but thanks for your input and advice...it's much appreciated.