GParted cancelled and my OS, too.

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

Using GParted to try to make a separate partition for /home, I got to the point where GParted put a small "window" on the screen with a bar, moving back and forth, back and forth. It said something like:

Move/Resize

/dev/sda1 to the left and shrink to 40 gig.

after 20 minutes or so of this, I thought the process stuck, so I clicked the cancel button. Gparted shut down fine, but when I tried to reboot from the disk, instead of the LiveCD that gparted ran from (so the drive was unmounted), I find the OS is blown up.

Any ideas?

[Jonathan183]

It sounds like you have stopped gparted part way through resizing an existing partition. What does

fdisk -l

report? Can you mount the partition using the live CD and save any data you need to a usb drive or something?
Unless you have some valuable data you need to try to recover then the quickest and easiest way to recover from this is probably an OS re-install - this time creating a home partition during the install.

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 1010 MB, 1010826752 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 122 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x91f72d24

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 122 979933+ 83 Linux

so, fdisk -l isn't seeing the hard drive at all.

[Jonathan183]

I'd expect fdisk to list the drive if it is connected ... can you check physical connections to the drive and that it is not disabled in BIOS or something? When you start the PC can you hear the hard drive spin up to speed? What is the 1GB sdb?

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

The 1 gig is a USB memory stick (jumpdrive)

by doing fdisk -l with sudo I got:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 38536 309540388+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 38537 38913 3028252+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 38537 38913 3028221 82 Linux swap / Solaris

[Jonathan183]

Partitions again ! Can you mount them, try something like ...

sudo -s
mkdir /manmount
mount /dev/sda1 /manmount
ls

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo -s
root@ubuntu:~# mkdir /manmount
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda1 /manmount
root@ubuntu:~# ls
Desktop Documents Music Pictures Public Templates Videos

I'm lost, am I seeing the directories of the LiveCD or something else?

[Jonathan183]

Sorry

ls /manmount
ls /manmount/home

[Mark_in_Hollywood]

root@ubuntu:/manmount# ls /manmount/home
mark

The name of my /home is mark (my first name). It looks like the /home is OK. How do I fix this?

[Jonathan183]

OK Mark - what I would do if I were you is ...
copy your home folder info to usb drive (or some other location off the hard drive), check all the documents you need are there. Reinstall Ubuntu and set it up with /, swap, and /home partitions.

Do you have anywhere you can copy your home area data to so that you can do a fresh install?

Do you know how to copy data using the command line?