1

Topic: major partition problem

Well, here's the story: I was resizing several of my partitions with the GParted Live CD. After it finished, it said there were 4 "warnings" and then when it went back to the partition screen it showed that there was still 7MB of unallocated space. It shouldn't have been there, so I assume that was the problem.

Anyway, I resized them again to use up that space, but this time it stopped completely with an error. Only, now when it went back to the partition screen, it showed the entire HD as unallocated space! I assumed this meant the HD had been wiped, but I was able to restart and load Windows as normal. My Windows partition now reflects the new size, so no trouble there I guess. But when I tried to boot into Ubuntu, that didn't work, and my shared partition is no longer available either, so I can only guess that all my other partitions were erased.

No big deal, really, but when I reboot with the GParted Live CD, it still shows the entire HD as "unallocated", so there's no way for me to simply delete those partitions officially and reclaim that space.

What do I do at this point? There are about 8GB of space that I don't have access to now.

Thanks,
John

2

Re: major partition problem

what version of gparted? where are your saved details? Is there any particular reason this is posted in livemedia and not in gparted? what is the output of fdisk -lu <device> and parted print...

etc etc.. smile

3

Re: major partition problem

It's the newest version...I just burned it. I did a "Save Details" but it seemed to save it to a Linux partition, which I think is gone now. I guess I posted it here because I was using the Live CD.

4

Re: major partition problem

yep, if you save it to your temporary root in memory you'll loose if after a reboot tongue
We like to keep livemedia and gpartedproblems separate and it's a bit up to the user to determine where a topic should go. In this case it seems you have issues with gparted and not with the livemedia, so i'm going to move it.

About help.. i'll read your post later in more detail, but without these details it's very hard to say what went wrong.

can we have the output of fdisk and parted as i requested in my previous post? thnx!

5

Re: major partition problem

I'll try this when I get home, but when I boot into Ubuntu now it gives me an error about a corrupt filesystem, but hopefully I can still access the terminal.

6

Re: major partition problem

otherwise (And actually i prefer that) you could use the livecd to get us this data.

7

Re: major partition problem

How would I do that?

8

Re: major partition problem

johnjsal wrote:

How would I do that?

#fdisk -lu /dev/<yourharddrive>
#parted /dev/<yourharddrive> (and after hint "p", like "print")

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

9

Re: major partition problem

What do I type for <yourharddrive>? The '/' symbol, or something more specific?

10

Re: major partition problem

exactly the drive you use e.g. : /dev/hda or /dev/hde or /dev/sda or /dev/whateveryouuse
if you dont know, type /dev/hd and then hint "tab" key, it will return all the possibilities .

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

11

Re: major partition problem

or just start gparted and see what devices it finds...

12

Re: major partition problem

Well that's the thing. When I run gparted, it just shows my entire hard drive as unallocated space. There are no partitions shown (no /dev/hda, etc.), so that's why I'm confused. My Windows partition is obviously still there, at 47GB, because I still use it as normal. But gparted isn't detecting anything.

13

Re: major partition problem

so are the devices detected or not?
Anyway, do a cat /proc/partitions and you'll see all devices. Then di the fdisk and parted on them to show us the output.

if possible a screenshot of gparted would be appreciated. see http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/ti … enshot.htm on how to do that.

14

Re: major partition problem

I'm sorry, I'm not as advanced with all this stuff. Do I run these commands from the terminal within the GParted Live CD? How do I save all this output and then access it later to show you?

15

Re: major partition problem

welcome to linux, where you have to do some work yourself and learn a great deal in the process... wink

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/documentation.php  <-- have fun smile

16

Re: major partition problem

Ok, here we go. I hope this sheds some light, because it means nothing to me. smile And like I said before, I should have a total of 5 partitions (Windows, Linux, /home, shared and swap).

This is the result of fdisk -lu:

---------------------
root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: invalid flag 0x010c of partition table 6 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *          63    99731519    49865728+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2        99731520   117210239     8739360    5  Extended
/dev/hda5        99731583   114061499     7164958+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6   ?  2083267318  4035807077   976269880   6f  Unknown

Disk /dev/sda: 257 MB, 257949696 bytes
8 heads, 63 sectors/track, 999 cylinders, total 503808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63      503807      251872+   e  W95 FAT16 (LBA)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(998, 7, 63) logical=(999, 4, 60)
------------------------

This is fdisk -lu /dev/hda1:

------------------------
root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu /dev/hda1

Disk /dev/hda1: 51.0 GB, 51062505984 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 6207 cylinders, total 99731457 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1p1   ?   218129509  1920119918   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda1p2   ?   729050177  1273024900   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda1p3   ?   168653938   168653938           0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda1p4      2692939776  2692991410       25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
-------------------------

And this is fdisk -lu /dev/hda5:

-----------------------------
root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu /dev/hda5

Disk /dev/hda5: 7336 MB, 7336917504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 891 cylinders, total 14329917 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Disk /dev/hda5 doesn't contain a valid partition table
---------------------------------

For some reason, doing fdisk on hda2 and hda6 produced no results.

Also, here is a link to a screenshot of what GParted shows when it reads my paritions:

http://johnjsalerno.com/gparted.jpeg

17

Re: major partition problem

thanks, btw you shouldn't have done the fdisk -lu on the partitions, only on the device (/dev/hda) but it's ok smile

Now i only need the output of the following:
start parted like 'parted /dev/hda' and then type 'print' once you're in parted.

/dev/hda6 looks very weird, it starts and ends far outside the disk hmm

18

Re: major partition problem

Ok, here you go:

root@GParted:~# fdisk -lu /dev/hda
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 6
Warning: invalid flag 0x010c of partition table 6 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *          63    99731519    49865728+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2        99731520   117210239     8739360    5  Extended
/dev/hda5        99731583   114061499     7164958+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6   ?  2083267318  4035807077   976269880   6f  Unknown

---------------------

root@GParted:~# parted /dev/hda
GNU Parted 1.7.1
Using /dev/hda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                           
Error: Invalid partition table on /dev/hda -- wrong signature 10c.       
Ignore/Cancel? ignore                                                     

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system  Flags
1      32.3kB  51.1GB  51.1GB  primary   ntfs         boot
2      51.1GB  60.0GB  8949MB  extended                   
5      51.1GB  58.4GB  7337MB  logical   ext3         

-----------------

Also, here's another screenshot, but this time with "Device Information" on the left side:
http://johnjsalerno.com/gparted.jpeg

19

Re: major partition problem

P.S. I'm thinking about just reformatting my HD and reinstalling Windows. It might be nice to just start over and completely erase this problem. But hopefully I won't run into problems during that process as well, if there is something wrong with these partitions!

20

Re: major partition problem

well, all i can say now is that /dev/hda6 is completely wrong, it starts and ends on a place far outside the disk. The reason you can see it in parted is because there you can press ignore, something that's not possible in gparted (yet).
Maybe i should try to read invalid partitiontables as well, but first i'd like to know what the consequences will be.

did you try removing /dev/hda6 ?

21

Re: major partition problem

I don't know how to remove hda6. The only way I know of is to use GParted to do it, but like the screenshot shows, it's not detecting any partitions at all.

22

Re: major partition problem

use fdisk

something like this should suffice:
fdisk /dev/hda
(press 'd')
(enter '6')
(press 'w')

good luck smile

23 (edited by johnjsal 2006-09-17 19:16:23)

Re: major partition problem

If I do this for all of them (except hda1), does that mean I will free up that space again and remove all the other partitions? If so, how would I add that space back to my main partition?

24

Re: major partition problem

Ok, I did what you said and deleted hda6, but nothing seems to have changed. Refreshing the view in GParted still gives me the "unallocated" entry for the entire hard drive. So I'm beginning to wonder, even if I delete the other partitions using fdisk, it seems like I still won't be able to add that space back to the Windows partition with GParted (unless it suddenly starts working properly again). Can fdisk be used to do this part as well?

Thanks.

25 (edited by johnjsal 2006-09-17 21:51:06)

Re: major partition problem

Alright, the saga is over! Using a small utility, I fixed my MBR (which I know I needed to do before deleting the Ubuntu partition), then I went back to fdisk and deleted hda2 (which was the extended partition that contained, or should have contained, all the others). Once that was deleted, then GParted was able to find hda1 again, plus the 8GB of unallocated space. So I resized the Windows partition back to full size and I'm done!

I just want to say thanks *very* much for all your patience and help. I would be nowhere without your guidance, especially with fdisk, since that's the only way I was able to do this! I was all set to just reinstall Windows altogether, which wouldn't have been too fun! smile

Thanks!
John