Partitioning Problem

[dfmalh]

Hi I an external HD problem, and a newbie to linux (Ubuntu flavour)

Here is my situation:

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA 32Mb Cash HD on Friday to use as an external backup HD (thesis, movies, music, etc). The HD is in an Eagle Consus case (support usb2.0 and up to 750GB HDs).

On a XP system, I could partition the Drive but I was unable to format it. Apparently there is some "time-out" error between the USB2 and the SATA connection, I am not exactly sure what it means exactly... but the bottom line is that it can't format the external that way.

I am not familiar with how to partition and format in linux (Ubuntu) so that is why I opted to go for XP... bad choice!

I installed Gparted, and after a long struggle got all the partitions removed, and created new ones. I created 3 partitions, and formated to the FAT32 file system (as a start), checked the 3 drives and they worked, mounted correctly, in Ubuntu and on the XP system.

So I decided to to change the first partition to ext3 file system, and one of the others to NTFS (I downloaded and installed ntfsprogs to do that). Everything fine, and everything is working.

The drives names are however the respective sizes of each partition... that won't do, so I tried to rename them...

I used this for the FAT32 partition: sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdb2 ::usbfat32
and this for the NTFS partition: sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdb3 -s ::usbntfs
and this for the EXT3 partition: sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 usbext3

...bad idea! now none of the partitions work.

See the attached picture of the pop up window.

The ext3 and fat32 partitions are mounted, but when you try and access them, it does not work.

When I unmount the drives, I get a message that data is being written to the drive, and I can not unplug the drive. After a while the message disappear, and a new message says that it is now safe to remove drive.

In Gparted I can see the different partitions. See picture.

I included the information windows for the NTFS drive that does not want to mount and also the information window for the ext3 (first partition) which gives me a "superblock" error message.

I can't run a check on any of the drives, it won't work. I can't remove any of the partition, because then the external drive "unmount"...

I think it has something to do with the "labels" that changed... Does any body know how to work around this, e.g. to be able to delete the partitions without having to "make use" of the labels...

I also burn the Gparted Live CD, and tried that. As soon as I try something, the HD unmount...

So, all I want to do is to delete all 3 partitions and start from scratch to create new partitions.

Can anybody help with this? Please...

ps. After I changed the FAT32 partition to EXT3 the partition seemed "larger", and the same for the NTFS partition, maybe it is something to do with that...

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums dfmalh

I don't know why GParted does not work for this. I suggest you boot from GParted CD, open a terminal and type

fdisk -l

the l is a small L
check which drive you want to erase and then follow the link here to MBR tricks. Use the dd command to erase the MBR ... be careful with the typing this will effectively erase the drive contents so make sure you pick the correct drive to erase. If you need more help post the output of the fdisk -l command here.

[dfmalh]

Hi Jonathan183,

Thanks for your reply, suggestions and welcome. I finally got time today to go back to the shop where I bought my HD. The first 200 sectors were bad... of course they swapped the drive for me.

Got back home, booted with Gparted Live CD and created my partitions, formatted the partitions, checked the disks etc. Not one problem! Everything worked like a charm!

For a little while there I thought it was me...

Now I just have to figure out how I can make mt ext3 drive writable, as I can read/open it, but can't copy anything to it. I know it is because the right belong to root... which would work better, if I also want to plug the drive into another system:

sudo chmod a+rw /media/DRIVENAME

or something else.

Thanks again for the help!

[Jonathan183]

If you intend to mount the disk every time you start the system then try using Yast->system->partitioner to setup mounts. Depending on what you are after

man mount chown chmod

should provide the information you need.

[devils casper]

Just give ownership of mount point to Regular User and Regular user will have read/write access in ext3 partition.
Execute id command and note down user_id and group_id. Use those in chown command.

id
su -
chown user_id:group_id  /media/DRIVENAME

[dfmalh]

Thanks, I will have a go at it over the weekend.

[devils casper]

Thanks, I will have a go at it over the weekend.

Ok ! Do let us know how it goes. Good Luck !