1 Topic by Scarlett

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Topic: I think I broke my OS

Okay, I have that sinking feeling I just did something really dumb and now I need help.  Please bear with me here, for I am a complete newb with Ubuntu and I may not be able to tell you exactly what I did in the correct terms. 

I just installed a 750 GB storage drive and used GParted to format it to ext3.  (Worked great, btw - very nice application.)  Once I was done I assumed I had to remount it since I had to unmount it to format.  So I went to System>Administration>Disks and I put it in scarlett/home.  I wish I could be more clear with the exact steps I took but I can't pull up Disk anymore to check.  In fact, I can't open anything at all including the terminal.  Not that I'd know what to do with it if I could open it, but it won't open  I happened to have two browser windows open which still work, but I can't open a third one. 

I have Windows XP on another drive, if that helps, and there's absolutely nothing on the new storage drive so reformatting isn't a problem if that's a possibility.  (Although it is somehow mysteriously missing about 50 GB but that's about the least of my problems right now.)  What did I do and can I fix it?  Thanks.

2 Reply by plors

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Re: I think I broke my OS

Scarlett wrote:

<snip>

(Although it is somehow mysteriously missing about 50 GB but that's about the least of my problems right now.)  What did I do and can I fix it?  Thanks.

that 50GB will be used a reserved space by the ext3 filesystem. I'm sorry, but i don't know what you did and subsequently can't help you smile
After some coffee i'll reread your post and see if i can make anything of it then.

3 Reply by LarryT

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Re: I think I broke my OS

I guess, you were running ubuntu on a hard drive (or partition), having XP on another one (or other partition), and installing a third hard drive (750 go). then you tried to format the 750 hd runnig gparted from ubuntu.

Is it right ?

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

4 Reply by Scarlett

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Re: I think I broke my OS

50 GB for a filesystem!?  That's bigger than my secondary drive that has the Linux OS installed on it... Is there a more econemical way to format it?

So yeah, I've got Windows on my master boot drive, Ubuntu is partitioned with more Windows stuff on my secondary drive with Grub to allow dual booting at start up and now I'm trying to add a third drive. I've heard it's easier to partition in Linux so I thought I'd format the whole as NTFS and then let Linux do it's thing.  When I installed it, it automatically set up a partition but I can't make it do that now.  Anyway, I ended up rebooting and everything went back to the way it's supposed to be but my drive is unmounted and I don't have the slightest idea how to put it back.  I also can't seem to partition it, only reformat the entire thing, so I'm thinking the easiest thing (for me) is just go back to Windows, reformat and partition and then format the second partition with GParted.   

But can you tell me how to mount it?  If there's an option for it in the app, I'm not seeing it.

5 Reply by plors

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Re: I think I broke my OS

ext2/3 takes 5% as reserved space by default. It is possible to adjust this with the -m option

-m reserved-blocks-percentage
Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved for the super-user.   This  avoids  fragmentation,  and  allows root-owned daemons, such as syslogd(8), to continue to function correctly after nonprivileged processes are prevented from writing to the filesystem.  The default percentage is 5%.

somehow i cannot read your other problem and understand it. Maybe it's due to the fact this is the second time i'm reading it early in the morning or maybe it's the amount of 'backgroundnoise'. Could you please bare with me and tell me your problem in 1 line? thnx!

btw, gparted is a partitioneditor, it will not create mountpoints and/or edit fstab (which wouldn't even make sense on a livecd smile )

6 Reply by Scarlett

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Re: I think I broke my OS

Sorry, if I had the slightest clue what I was doing, this might be easier.  wink

Maybe mount isn't the right word.  How do make it so I can access it?  I've got this huge drive and I don't have permission to put anything in it.  My original thinking was to make a shortcut through the home folder since that's the only one I can write to and hope the permissions would be inherited.  I'm trying to avoid having to use the terminal and log in as root every time I want to access it. 

As long as I'm being confusing, I have another question.  I'd like to resize the partition on the drive that the Linux OS is loaded on.  Can I do that while I'm using Linux without breaking anything?

7 Reply by plors

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Re: I think I broke my OS

Scarlett wrote:

Sorry, if I had the slightest clue what I was doing, this might be easier.  wink

Maybe mount isn't the right word.  How do make it so I can access it?  I've got this huge drive and I don't have permission to put anything in it.  My original thinking was to make a shortcut through the home folder since that's the only one I can write to and hope the permissions would be inherited.  I'm trying to avoid having to use the terminal and log in as root every time I want to access it.

That is beyond the scope of gparted and i simply don't have time to teach you the basics of permissions in linux wink. GParted will create partitions and filesystems, but after that it's up to you wat to do with them.

Scarlett wrote:

As long as I'm being confusing, I have another question.  I'd like to resize the partition on the drive that the Linux OS is loaded on.  Can I do that while I'm using Linux without breaking anything?

You can only manipulate unmounted partitions, so you cannot do anything to the rootpartition of your running system. In order to do this you need to start gparted from a livecd. I advice you to use the latest gparted livecd, get it from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

8 Reply by Scarlett

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Re: I think I broke my OS

Ok.  Well, thanks for your time.