1 Topic by sci.crazi

  • sci.crazi
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Topic: Gparted does not recognise partitions

Hi

I had used some earlier earlier version of gparted to resize my vista partion in Dell Inspiron 1520 and made it it a dual boot system with Ubuntu.

I did not remove the Media direct and  recovery partitions and gparted seemed to work perfectly

Now I want to make some more changes and I used the gparted version 0.3.7-7 to again resize my partition. (Scratched my last disk ... cant even remember the version) However gparted does not recognise any partitions and shows unallocated disk space of 160 Gb.

I have been updating my windows vista all this time.
also used ext2ifs to access linux partition from vista ...

I dont think that should have changed anything much but I just added it for information.

Please help

Thanks
Pradeep

2 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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Re: Gparted does not recognise partitions

Hi!

I once had the (apparently) same problem - a hard drive showing as empty in GParted, although there are definitely partitions existing on it - wit an older version of GParted. The cause for the trouble was (in my case) a malformed chain of extended partitions: Two extended partitions were overlapping; however, the logicals stored inside were not, so everything looked fine as long as the software only looked at the logicals. Interesting point was that this partition layout was created by the then-current version of GParted...

I don't know if this is the exact reason for your problems as well, and if GParted was updated or fixed in this point; however, 0.3.7 is really old, so you should better use a more recent LiveCD (which can be downloaded from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php ).
If this does not help, you should post here the output of the command 

fdisk -lu

(which can be issued from your hard drive-installed Ubuntu as well as from within GParted - the results will be the same).

3 Reply by LewRockwellFAN (edited by LewRockwellFAN 2010-04-07 16:22:26)

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Re: Gparted does not recognise partitions

stormhead wrote:

fdisk -lu

I have a similar problem.  Running Gparted from either a Ubuntu 9.1, Karmic Koala, live CD or a Sabayon 5.1  live DVD with only the one problematic Seagate 500 GB drive connected or from Ubuntu on another HD with both drives connected, I can read and write data to the drive just fine. All aps I've tried have no problems with it. But Gparted reports it as a drive full of unallocated space.

fdisk -lu returns only a new prompt. Here, I did it twice:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ fdisk -lu
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ fdisk -lu
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

4 Reply by LewRockwellFAN

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Re: Gparted does not recognise partitions

OK, I solved MY problem since I posted the last item. Or rather SRS at the Ubuntu forum did. Bad entries in the partition table of unknown origin with testdisk suspected. Fixed with sfdisk. Details here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1448605

Since it's not my thread I won't mark it solved but perhaps it should be as the older entries are fairly old and this is a solution for at least SOME problems that might get people looking in this thread.

5 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Gparted does not recognise partitions

Thank you for posting back here with how you solved the problem.  smile

GParted 0.5.1 and higher now display the output from parted indicating what parted believes is the problem.  This previous bug can be viewed at the following link:
Entire disk shown as unallocated - parted says overlapping partitions