1 Topic by SHARK

  • SHARK
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Topic: Fat32 resizing and replacing failed

I've got a problem, and would really really appriciate it if you could give me some advice.

I just repartitioned my harddisk with the latest GParted Live CD (0.3.4-7). I had some unallocated space and on the end of it a Fat32 partition. So, I moved it to the left and resized it to the maximum so it would cover the whole unallocated space.

Now everything went well. But... after a while I noticed it stopped and the only thing I saw was the orange background including the icons on the top, but the GParted-window disappeared. I clicked the Gparted icon and saw that there was somehing wrong (filesystem unknown), did a reboot, and still the same result.

So these were my partitions before:
/dev/hda1: ext3 25 Gib, used 7 Gib
unallocated
/dev/hda4: extended, size ?
/dev/hda6: linux swap 730 mb
/dev/hda5: fat32 100 gib (more or less, don't now it exactly)

And now it's:
/dev/hda1: ext3 25 gib, used 7 gib
/dev/hda4 extended size 164 gib
/dev/hda6 linux swap, 729 mb
/dev/hda5 (!) unknown, 109.91 gib

So it could be that the data is still in hda5 and that the moving went well, but the actual resizing failed. At the moment I don't dare to do more modifications since I don't have a backup (stupid).

So, what do you advise me to do in this situation? Any way of recreating the fat32 structure on the hda5?

2 Reply by SheeEttin

  • SheeEttin
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Re: Fat32 resizing and replacing failed

Boot to Windows and chkdsk or boot to Linux and dosfsck it. (If Linux, you might want to read the dosfsck(8) man page.)

For external use only.

SheeEttin's Website

3 Reply by SHARK (edited by SHARK 2007-06-06 10:43:32)

  • SHARK
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Re: Fat32 resizing and replacing failed

I tried but it failed. This is what I did: (using Ubuntu on hda1):

root@shark02:/# dosfsck /dev/hda5
dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
Currently only 1 or 2 FATs are supported, not 73.

root@shark02:/#

And dmesg tells me this (even more worrying):

FAT: invalid media value (0x2b)
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sda5.

So, I've got a Fat32 parition with 73 fat tables, or it's totally messed up. Any other suggestions? You would really help me with this.

4 Reply by SheeEttin

  • SheeEttin
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Re: Fat32 resizing and replacing failed

Yeah, I'd say that's messed up.
Before you do anything else, I'd suggest you check it over with chkdsk to make sure there isn't an error that's just being reported incorrectly.

If you still encounter problems, I'm afraid about all you can do is reformat.

For external use only.

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