1 Topic by raju.mailinglists

  • raju.mailinglists
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Topic: filesystem on a partition becomes unknown after using it

I used gparted 0.14.0 via a live CD to partition "Western Digital WD Scorpio Black 750 GB SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache Internal Bulk/OEM 2.5-Inch Mobile Hard Drive".

First I created an msdos partition table then created various fat32, ntfs, ext3 partitions. The fat32, ntfs, ext3 are 50 GB each. Everything went fine and there were no errors.

Then I tried to copy some files into one of the ext3 patitions of the hard drive. But there were some I/O errors during the copy. This is a new hard drive... so the I/O errors are a bit of a surprise.

To investigate further I tried to look at the hard drive's partition table from the gparted live CD. This time all the ext3 partitions show up as unknown.

Can anyone tell me what I should do at this point? Is the disk broken?

Couple of questions:
1) When gparted partitions the drive, does it create a file system? or should I create the filesystem manually?
2) Does gparted check for bad blocks when formatting the partitions?
3) Should I leave any space between the partitions? Any special alignments I need to do while creating the partitions?
4) How can I upload a screenshot in to the forum posts? I am using the browser supplied in the live CD to post this...

thanks
raju

2 Reply by raju.mailinglists

  • raju.mailinglists
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Re: filesystem on a partition becomes unknown after using it

Here is the screenshot... http://imagebin.org/237946

3 Reply by class413

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Re: filesystem on a partition becomes unknown after using it

You can check the messages given by the yellow triangles in the GParted screen. These messages refer to the problem(s).

1) GParted creates the filesystem you selected on the creation form. You can format manually too, at any time.

2) GParted doesn't check for bad blocks before formatting. However, it checks this before applying move/resize operations.
To fully check the partition space for bad blocks, you can manually use the formatting commands for the specific file systems.

3) You have to respect the alignment that is the best for your operating system(s) and hardware. Older o.s. and hardware worked with the cylinder alignment (before vista, for the ms systems). Newer systems (including vista, win7 and recent linux distributions) default to the MiB alignment. This is the best for the latest hard drive generations too (SSD drives, "advanced format" hard drives that use the 4kiB/sector format), for better performance.

No special empty space is needed between partitions, however take into account that:
- The first and the last MiB of the hard drive space have to be left out of the partitions (this is needed for the GPT partition tables).
- Leave another MiB between the extended partition start and the first logical partition, for the extended partition table.

4) For the screenshots, that's exactly as you did: upload the images to a hosting service and post the link here. The forum doesn't allow uploads, to prevent spam.

Finally, another detail:
It is better to keep the logical partitions in order in the hard drive, otherwise some tools couldn't understand correctly the partition structure.

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