1 Topic by bdam (edited by bdam 2006-09-07 02:56:23)

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Topic: Resize Failed

So I have a second drive that originally had two NTFS partitions.  Neither partition was being used to boot off of meaning my OS (WinXP) is safely on another drive.

Originally this drive had two partitions: roughly 5G and 27G (in that order).  I no longer needed the 5G partition so I had GParted (most recent live cd) remove the partition and resize/move the 27G partition.  It was going to take a while so I let it sit overnight.  I got an error saying that it couldn't read a particular sector.  Unfortunately it was early in the morning and I was still half asleep so I didn't write down exactly what the error was.  Currently GParted sees the second 27G partition but it's labelled unknown and there is still the empty 5G space before it.  XP no longer recognizes either of the partitions on the drive and prompt to format it.

So I think it's safe to say the data is likely still intact as long as the drive hasn't suffered a hardware malfunction.  Any thoughts as to what I can do?  If I just remade the 27G partition using fdisk how would I find the sector to have it start on and what would happen to the data already moved?

EDIT:
Looks like my number were off: http://img520.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gpartedlt5.jpg

2 Reply by plors

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Re: Resize Failed

Hi bdam,

Why do people always miss the 'Save Details' button, which is positioned 1 cm to the left of the 'Close' button? With the detailed output i could've helped you tracing the error and find a solution. Right now i can only guess and it's not positive. If something went wrong in the middle of the move and we don't know at which sector it was i'm afraid you lost all your data.

Do you have any idea why you didn't save the details? Did you overlook it or something? Any idea on how to make users save their details? I could do it automatically, but it would be lost as soon as you quit the livecd, so we need some userintervention.

Again, it's a pity and i hope you have a backup

3 Reply by plors

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Re: Resize Failed

btw, can you still remember anything about the details? Are you sure the error was about not being able to read a particular sector?
If you can remember that sector we can work on a recovery. (unfortenately a 'maybe' or 'about' isn't going to work, we need the _exact_ sector)

thanks

4 Reply by plors

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Re: Resize Failed

and can you run a badblocks check on this device? ( see man badblocks) for more details.

5 Reply by bdam

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Re: Resize Failed

Ok, this is going to be long.

Unfortunately no I don

6 Reply by plors

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Re: Resize Failed

Bryan,

thanks for your reply, i'll get back to you in more detail later.

7 Reply by plors

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Re: Resize Failed

ok, point by point:
2) http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/ti … etails.htm

3) is a very good point. internal rollback is somewhere on my TODO. Anyway, your bug inspired me to perform a readonly run before doing the actual move. I'll implement that tonight.

4)the actual move is not done on filesystemlevel, but at sector level. We simply copy raw sectors to another location. You understand that especially in case of overlap this will thoroughly messup your filesystem if it crashes somewhere halfway.

The next release (which will be done very soon) will indeed contain some detailed pointers on what to do in case of error. Of course we already show an errordialog when something went wrong, but i'll add info about saving the details etc.. as well..
Together with that readonly run we've made moving already a bit saver.

Ok, i'd like to see that badblocksoutput because it's interesting to know WHY the read failed. We have tested moving many times on many different disks/machines and i've never seen a read error. A bad sector could explain something.

About recovery, you could try to create an empty partition around the new filesystem, but i'm afraid it won't help. As you now probably understand from point 4, the sectors are mixed and meshed up and your filesystem is quite literally scattered across the disk. Without knowing the exact errorlocation it's almost impossible to reconstruct it.

Again, i'm sorry and like to thank you for your positive attitude towards this issue smile

8 Reply by bdam

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Re: Resize Failed

Thanks Plors for the continued dialog.

I should have been more clear that number 2 wasn't a current question.  I found that very walk-through when looking for it.  The problem was that I couldn't look for or get to that while using the LiveCD.  If you only have one machine and you're using the LiveCD you're out of luck without a browser.  Once you reboot the info is gone so you need someway of getting to that walkthrough while on the LiveCD.

I should have been more vague about the error.  It had something to do with a particular sector on my hard drive.  It could have been read, it could have been write, it was morning and I hadn't had my tea yet.  Let that be a lesson to you all.  I'll do a badblock on it and let you know.

I would strongly suggest the automatic log path.  The sort of thing that would be useful to say in this info is "#### failed because #### which means your drive is #####".  In deciding to save the log or not it's important to know what failed, why it failed, where it failed, and that resulting status of your drives and partitions.

I really can

9 Reply by plors

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Re: Resize Failed

bdam wrote:

<snip>

I really can

10 Reply by bdam

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Re: Resize Failed

Haha, if anything the paypal should flow your way.

One thing I'd like your opinion on that I mentioned above.  Why is it necessary to move/swap sectors at all when expanding a partition?  If my understanding is correct some info has to be at the beginning of each drive and each partition on the drive so that

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