Topic: [SOLVED] Failed to mount, enclosing drive for the volume locked
Running gparted from Salix 13.37 LiveCD. Please be kind; I'm a total Linux newbie but have spent days reading Linux doc and searching for help for my specific issue.
The hard drive had a Windows NTFS partition 26.91 GiB called IBM_PRELOAD. Plus a small partition for HW diagnostics, creator and purpose unknown. I wanted to define 4 Linux partitions and keep/resize the Windows NTFS partition. Could not resize the NTFS partition, as Min and Max sizes were the same. gparted reported the drive had at at least 3 bad sectors and said what to do (but like an IDIOT I failed to write this down).
I decided it would be easier to simply blow away the NTFS partition and start clean with Linux only. I assumed gparted (like Windows fdisk?) could test the drive, mark bad sectors, and do low-level formatting and build a new partition table. (This assumption may have been a poor one.) I selected my Linux partitions sizes, set one as type=swap. gparted completed 2 of the 4 operations then reported
Failed to mount "%"
The enclosing drive for the volume is locked.
I retried by deleting all partitions except the swap which seemed to be OK. The same error appeared, this time in addition reporting
Failed to mount "%home"
I studied the Details screen which said "all operations successfully completed" and it listed
Delete /dev/sda1 (ext2, 4.88 GiB) from /dev/sda
Create primary partition #1 (ext2, 4.89 GiB) on /dev/sda
Create primary partition #2 (ext2, 14.65 GiB) on /dev/sda
Create primary partition #3 (ext2, 7.91 GiB) on /dev/sda
I saw no errors in the pull-down details under each operation (but failed to write down all the info provided). Didn't realize the difficulty of saving details when there is no filesystem other than in memory and didn't realize the importance of writing down all details.
Then I tried the Salix Installer, gave it all the parameters requested including partition details, it invoked gparted and no errors were reported, and the installation proceeded for about 30 minutes reading the liveCD and writing to the drive (apparently). The installer then hung and did nothing further and was unresponsive.
I rebooted and invoked gparted. Some of the partitions shown graphically appeared to have a small amount of data written to them? (the color was shown partially filled in, I'm not sure what this indicates).
I tried the Salix Installer again to no avail, same hang after about 30 minutes of intense CD-ROM activity.
Bear in mind I'm a Linux newbie and not familiar at all with Linux console commands. (Please be kind!) I wondered if there was a partial file system on the drive that I could access from the graphical file system manager. That gave me access only to files on the CD-ROM, not the hard drive. I shut it down for the night (as we are off the grid, and house power is off overnight).
-----------------------
I don't have a Windows recovery disk for this 2003 ThinkPad T23. It used to be Windows XP Professional SP3 running in a single NTFS partition created by Windows. I have a Windows recovery disk for a different laptop with newer hardware but have not tried it yet.
Researched the Linux fdisk command to see if fdisk can check the hard drive for errors, mark bad sectors, and low-level format before attempting to repeat partitioning operations.
At this point some suggestions from people who know what they're doing would be really appreciated. I don't expect to recover the Windows NTFS partition. I just want to install Linux on this machine.
Thank you.
Sky