[vox-tech] HD Repartition frustration

[Alex Mandel]

Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> On Thursday 15 June 2006 06:37, Donald Greg McGahan wrote:
> 
>>I have a 100Gb Seagate 2.5 inch hard drive that currently has a ntfs
>>partition, and extended partition with a fat32 partition within it. I
>>wanted to repartition it to a single fat32 partition. I removed it from
>>it's (third party) external enclosure and installed it as an secondary
>>IDE slave (adapter) in my AMD K7 (1.33MHz) Ubuntu OS box.
>>I cannot seem to accomplish this task?!?
>>I've tired deleting all of the partitions and then writing but no joy.
>>I've been fussing with this on and off for a few days and thought I get
>>some help.
>>Here is what I'm doing.
>>I pop open a terminal window and
>>
>>fdisk /dev/hdd (i've tried both with sudo and sudo su)
>>
>>then
>>
>>Command (m for help): p
>>
>>Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
>>255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
>>Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>>
>>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>>/dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
>>/dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
>>/dev/hdd5           10028       12161    17141323+   b  W95 FAT32
>>
>>Command (m for help): d
>>Partition number (1-5): 5
>>
>>Command (m for help): p
>>
>>Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
>>255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
>>Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>>
>>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>>/dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
>>/dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
>>
>>Command (m for help): w
>>The partition table has been altered!
>>
>>Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
>>Syncing disks.
>>dig at vill:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/hdd
>>
>>The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 12161.
>>There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
>>and could in certain setups cause problems with:
>>1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
>>2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
>>   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
>>
>>Command (m for help): p
>>
>>Disk /dev/hdd: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
>>255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
>>Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
>>
>>   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>>/dev/hdd1               1       10027    80541846    7  HPFS/NTFS
>>/dev/hdd2           10028       12161    17141355    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
>>/dev/hdd5           10028       12161    17141323+   b  W95 FAT32
>>
>>Command (m for help):
> 
> This is strange. 
> 
> I just tried using fdisk and parted on this drive, and neither were able to 
> alter the existing partition table. Checking kern.log revealed some odd 
> errors:
> 
> 
> usb 5-1: reset high speed USB device using address 28
> scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery: host 22 channel 0 id 0 
> lun 0
> SCSI error : <22 0 0 0> return code = 0x50000
> end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 3168
> Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 396
> lost page write due to I/O error on sdb
> scsi22 (0:0): rejecting I/O to offline device
> ...
> 
> ... looks like the disk is bad?
> 
> anyone else have any ideas?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 

I did something like this a couple of months ago and seem to recall the 
NTFS partition being fussy about being deleted. I'm trying to remember 
what I did, I want to say that I simply used parted and hit delete 
partition as the only operation. After that completed, then I went back 
and restarted parted and put a new format.

Scenario 2 is that I dual booted into windows and used Partition Magic.

Scenario 3 is that Knoppix for some reason was able to do it, but Ubunut 
u wasn't for some odd reason.

Sorry I can't remember which one worked, I'll ask the person I did it 
for and see if she remembers.

Alex