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Topic: Gparted Live CD 0.11.0-10 crash upon reading a drive

History of the drive:
External USB 2.0 drive, 1TB, previously formatted as FAT32 in 1 Partition. Used originally on Windows 7, then Mac OSX. Drive is only a few months old, so it's possible that it's just a bad physical HD.

Steps taken immediately before the issue:
In GParted wrote a new partition table (msdos format)
Attempted to partition into two partitions:
500GB HFS+ label 'TimeMachine'
500GB NTFS label 'FILES'

The issue:
After 11 hours, the HFS+ creation had finished.
The NTFS operation failed with an error about the label. I unforutnately didn't note what the error was.

Now whenever GParted attempts to read the drive, it crashes. From the command line, the following stacktrace is given.

15: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(ped_assert+0x29) [0xb7811fd9]
14: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(ped_geometry_read+0x123) [0xb781b963]
13: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(hfsplus_probe+0x377) [0xb7838e37]
12: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(ped_file_system_probe_specific+0x5e) [0xb78139ce]
11: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(ped_file_system_probe+0x6d) [0xb7813add]
10: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(+0x446b1) [0xb78496b1]
9: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(+0x4684e) [0xb784b84e]
8: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libparted.so.0(ped_disk_new+0x61) [0xb7819e51]
7: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin() [0x80ba9be]
6: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin() [0x80c504f]
5: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin() [0x8105e10]
4: /usr/lib/libglibmm-2.4.so.1(+0x3c0f2) [0xb6f350f2]
3: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so.0(+0x6cdd4) [0xb6d5cdd4]
2: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0(+0x5954) [0xb6bd5954]
1: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(clone+0x53) [0xb6b56dee]
Aborted

In MacOSX The HFS+ partition shows up, but MacOSX wants to initialize the drive before use, I have not given it permission to do so yet.

Any ideas on how to proceed to get this up and running?

2 (edited by gedakc 2012-02-03 21:32:10)

Re: Gparted Live CD 0.11.0-10 crash upon reading a drive

EDIT:  The crash looks like a problem with the libparted library reading the partition table.  It is possible that some remnants of previous partition tables or hybrids might cause the error.
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As a work-around you might try overwritting the entire drive with zeroes, and checking to see if any errors were encountered.

First backup all of the data from the drive if you have data you do not wish to lose.
Next use the following command to overwrite the entire drive with zeroes.
Warning:  Be sure to pick the correct device entry!  Data loss will result otherwise!

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/path-to-your-disk-device

Where /path-to-your-disk-device is something like /dev/sdg
Please note that this command might take a very long time to run.

When the dd command finishes (it should halt with some error message when it reaches the end of the drive), use the following command to check for disk errors:

dmesg

Note that you can also run dmesg while the dd command is running if you suspect drive errors are being encountered.

If there are no errors then please proceed to try to create the partitions again.