Hello everyone, u can just call me gzou

So, Right now on my old (but only) 500mhz K6-II I have two hard disks. First one has 16 GB and the second has 40GB. Here's my general partition scheme:

Master Hard Disk (17GB):

hda1: Primary, 5 GB, ext3 (Xubuntu Edgy)
hda2: Primary, 10 GB, NTFS (Windows XP)
hda3: Primary, 512 MB, swap
hda4: Primary, around 500 MB, FAT32 (used to exchange files between Windows and Linux)

Slave Hard Disk:

hdb1: Primary, 10GB, FAT32 (random stuff)
hdb2: Primary, 600 MB, swap
hdb4: Extended Partition (beginning of logicals)
hdb5: Logical, 5GB, reiserfs (Zenwalk)
hdb6: Logical, 1.5GB, ext3 (Beginning of LFS)
hdb7: Logical, 5GB, reiserfs (Slax)
hdb8: Logical, 5GB, reiserfs (Beginning of Gentoo)
(the rest is free space, around 12 GB)


I use my Second hard disk mostly to try out new linux distros without any chance of harming my main hard disk. I use Gparted from Xubuntu to reformat my second hard drive when I need to delete or move around partitions depending on what I want to do with my distros. My problem now though is that Gparted and parted are no longer capable of seeing the partitions on the slave hard disk. I can still mount the partitions through Xubuntu, and when I boot off grub onto one of those partitions it works fine, fdisk -l shows all my partitions like they're supposed to and even Windows can still acess hdb1. But when I start up gparted it shows my second hard disk as completely blank.

So I was wondering if anyone had a clue to what the problem is and what to do to fix it. for now I can still use fdisk to manage a bit my partitions, but I'd like to get (at least) parted running again since I find it much easier to copy, shrink, grow, move, etc.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Just in case it's an issue with your parted package: Try the Gparted LiveCD; it uses the latest Gparted with a maximum of features implemented. If that doesn't work, you're back at field one, but it may work (since fdisk and booting are working, it shouldn't be an issue with the partition table...).

Did all this start after a Xubuntu upgrade or just out of the blue?

M.

I just tried downloading the Gparted livecd and it gives me the same thing as the Gparted in Xubuntu: shows the 2nd hard disk as blank.

Sorry for not mentionning what I did before the problem started, should have included it in my first post -_- anyways, I was trying to install pclinuxos onto the 2nd hard drive, but The kernel never wanted to boot up. So I deleted the partition through Gparted In Xubuntu. It's a few days after that, when I restarted gparted that I noticed the problem

bumpety bump bump

Sorry, didn't see your post yesterday. However, I'm not able to make anything out of the situation as you describe it - if you formatted the first partition of the second drive, there is a possibility I can think of, but I'm far from sure. It's an idea I'm not very confident about, but... well, it might inpire someone who's more experienced to voice an opinion : The second hard drive should have an MBR of itself, and a partitioning tool will most likely rely directly on the information on the drive (rather than the bootloader). However, I've got no clue why GRUB still works with the second disc if anything like that had happened.

Could you try something like fdisk or parted from Zenwalk (or any distro that's on the second drive)? Or maybe even GRUB from within one of those installations - but be careful and read up on all that; if GRUB tries to install on the first hard drive's MBR, you'll be in big trouble if anything fails, so please, don't take me for granted! It's nothing more than a somewhat educated guess...

M.