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OK, I have an HP laptop and an external USB drive. the Laptop dual boots into Windows 10 and Linux Mint, I'd like to allocat half the external drive to Windows and half to Linux.
The Windows bit has been easy - created an NTFS partition on the drive using only half the apace available
But when I go into Linux Hard Disk manager utility it shows the drive (/dev/sdb) but it also says "No medium" in the volumes section of the window, and none of the menu alternatives (format partition, edit partition etc) show as available. The only one showing up is "Edit Mount options"
fdisk -l shows all the entries for /dev/sda but there's no mention of /dev/sdb
Help! What am I missing? I 'm sure it's pretty simple. I'm a noob to Linux, so any commands etc please spell them out.
Thanks so far - I downloaded Gparted but it is not even seeing the device - the disk utility saw it and listed it as /dev/sdb, but wouldn't let me do anything. gparted only sees /dev/sda...
Your /dev directory can have any number of /dev/sd[abcdefghijkl] letters. It does not mean you have a physical drive just because there is a filename.
From all I can see you have one drive it is called /dev/sda. It is 238G in size.
That correct or incorrect?
The partitions on it show as:
EFI System: 260M
Microsoft reserved: 16M
Microsoft basic data: 185.1G
Windows recovery environment: 980M
Microsoft basic data: 14.5G
Linux filesystem: 29.8G
Linux swap: 7.9G
--------------------------------------
Total: 238G
It would appear that Windows has reserved all of the remaining drive space for itself when you wanted to use only half of the drive space.
GParted can allow you to shrink that partition. However first you should determine if this information make sense about the total capacity of the drive.
There's also an external 1Tb USB drive connected that the Hard Disk manager that comes with Mint can see (ie, it identifies it correctly as a Seagate drive, picks up its serial number, and calls it /dev/sdb..) but won't allow me to access to format, create / change partition size etc..
Issue the dmesg command to see the log without the drive.
Plug in the 1 TB USB drive.
Issue the dmesg command again to see the changes to the log now that the drive is plugged in.
It seems Mint sees it somehow, but does not mount it, nor can also understand that partitioning scheme for that drive. Therefore I'm wondering what happens when you plug that drive in and what the system log shows.
Please don't post your entire system log dumps, they'll be too much of non-relevant data. Only the changes added at the end would be relevant.
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