[SOLVED] LiveCD shows HD as "unallocated"

For all I know these machines are 20 years old or they are 2 days old. They could be ide or scsi or even raid. I don't know and can't even think about looking into anything without hardware info.

Sorry for omitting necessary details:

The machines are 2-4 years old

(1) HP Pavilion f370. ?Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3 GHz 3GB memory

HD IDE Maxtor 6Y200P0 with 3 primary partitions (hda1, hda3, hda4) and 7 extended (hda5, hda6, hda7, hda8, hda9, hda10, hda11).  Running Linux Mandrake 10.2. Boot is ext3, the rest Reiser (not Reiser4).

LiveCD sees the HD but fails to recognise any partitions or used space.
Live CD recognises a 2GB flash disk (Calibre Ultralight - recent) correctly as FAT16
Live CD sees a 8GB flash disk (Flash Drive - very recent) but recognises it incorrectly as FAT32 and marks it with an error symbol preventing information retrieval.

(2) Mesh Matrix M Value (made to order). AMD Athlon XP 2800+  512MB memory.

HD1: IDE Maxtor 64160P0 150GB.  2 primary partitions (hda2, hda4), 5 extended (hda5, hda6, hda7, hda8, hda9). 1 empty partition at the start of the disk, where a Win'98 installatiion was deleted. Boot is ext3, the rest Reiser (not Reiser4).

HD2: IDE Western Digital WD400BB-55JKC0 40GB. 1 primary partition. FAT32.

Running dual-boot: Linux Mandrake 10.2 on HD1; Win'98 on HD2.

LiveCD sees HD1 but fails to recognise any partitions or used space.
Live CD recognises HD2 as FAT32 and shows the proportions of used/unused space.

fdisk -l

/dev/hda 203.9GB ...... bytes
255 heads 63 sectors 24792 cylinders
Units =cylinders of 16065x512=8225280 bytes
device boot start        end           blocks       id system
hda1   *    1              12           96358+       83 Linux
hda2        395         24792       195976935         5 extended
hda3        13            394         3068415        82 linux swap
hda4        13332       13586         2048287+       83 linux
hda5        395           840         3582463+       83 linux
hda6        7214        12312        40957686        83 linux
hda7        841          5939        40957686        83 linux
hda8        5940         7213        10233373+       83 linux
hda9        12313       13331         8185086        83 linux
hda10       16136       24792        69737321        83 linux
hda11       13587       16135        20474811        83 linux

partition table entries are not in disk order

[Note: MDK 10.2 assigns hda1-4 to primary partitions - so numbering and disk order aren't the same]

Gparted: HardDisk Information Maxtor 6y210P0
size 189.92GB  path /dev/hda
heads 255; sectors; 63 cylinders 24792
total sectors 398283480

parted print:
"can't have overlapping partitions"

P.S. I now think the 8GB memory stick business is probably a red herring - please forget it for the time being

well, this is quite clear, one or more partitions are overlapping each other and you need to delete the overlapping ones. after a quick look i see hda4 (primary) which is overlapping with hda2 (extended).

removing the extended partition implies removing all the logicals (5 and up). It's up to you how you want to solve this overlap, but i'd like to urge you to think carefull before doing anything.

how did you get it anyway?

P.S. On thinking further, I'm getting confused
Dont' you have to define an extended partition in order to be able to define logical partitions? If so, the extended partition necessarily overlaps with its contained logical partitions. As far as I can see, there was no overlapping in machine 1 apart from the (extended) hda2.

Can you straighten me out on this?

Aah! I begin to see light  - thanks very much At least I have a better idea where to start treading (warily).

Could you also suggest what I might do with machine 2:
to deal with the fdisk - hda1 start1:end 1 block 0 partition, doesn't end on a cylinder boundary, compared with
                         diskdrake - empty initial partition, all subsequent sectors 1 less than fdisk?

Many thanks

Sorry - I should have been more explicit. This was the original post
/begin quote:
With regard to machine 2, there's a similar situation [**note added: i.e. overlapping partitions - hda3 is an extended partition. neither hda3 nor hda1 show up in diskdrake**], but with this addition:
diskdrake shows an empty partition at the start of hda (where a Win '98 installation was deleted) and shows no hda1
fdisk labels the empty partition as hda1: "start sector: 1, end sector: 1, blocks: 0; partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary"
then shows all the start and end sectors of hda partitions1 larger than the corresponding diskdrake information, e.g. DiskDrake hda2 start: 7012, end: 7017; fdisk hda2 start: 7013, end: 7018.
I presume this is a DOS problem - can you give me any advice about correcting it?
/end quote

hi plors, I'll do that as soon as I can get back to machine 2.
thanks again.

Update on machine 2:

parted print:
"can't have overlapping partitions"

fdisk -lu:
Disk /dev/hda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders, total 320173056 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           0           0           0    0  Empty
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda2       112647780   112744169       48195   83  Linux
/dev/hda3       112744170   163252529    25254180    5  Extended
/dev/hda4       138705210   159172019    10233405   83  Linux
/dev/hda5       112744233   114575579      915673+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6       114575643   116198144      811251   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7       116198208   128471804     6136798+  83  Linux
/dev/hda8       128471868   138705209     5116671   83  Linux
/dev/hda9       159172083   163252529     2040223+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/hdc: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders, total 78165360 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdc1   *          63    78156224    39078081    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)