Hard Drive Partition Problem.
 

I can't seem to format, access, or delete this partition. (hda5) It fills up half of my hard drive and I'd like to be able to reclaim the space.

I'm running 2.6.14-1.1656_FC4smp.

i'v never heard of f6.. maybe it is an anomoly.. or a hidden nfts-- the way you have the other two ntfs/win-lbas behind it.

i'd delete the previous two win partitians.. and i'd never put them in the middle of any disk (or any disk with another partitian that i cherish).

good luck.

Looks like a sick Partition Table. /dev/hda4 has an ID of "f". That should be an Extended Partition, but the End is probably wrong, as it would normally be much higher than the Start. Maybe both are actually correct, or maybe both wrong, because if that was an Extended, then it either can only be length 1 if /dev/hda3 is correct, or if it was bigger, then /dev/hda3 coudn't start where it does.

Also, the Start/End for /dev/hda5 are way too big for the drive, and they must also be contained within an Extended partition. Plus, End is greater than Start.

Try deleting 3, 4, and 5. Try different orders if the first doesn't work. But remember to back stuff up first, as you might end up trashing the whole disk.

halvy: Hidden ntfs partitions are usually Id 17, but that's not to say it can't be that.

Cheers,
Eddie

If you find a solution, please post it here. I had a similar problem recently but couldn't solve it so I ended up backing up the data, blowing it away and re-creating from scratch.

One of the boxes in my test lab had been set up with the corporate SOE. It had 4 primary partitions, the first 2 were NTFS (drives C & D), the 3rd was fat32 (held a powerquest backup image for fast restore) and the 4th was NTFS (Netware NAL cache). Partitions 3 and 4 were not visible to users.

I booted the PC with a Fedora core 4 CD, blew away the partitions and installed FC4 without any problems. Oddly, fdisk correctly reported that the disk was a 20GB disk but only the first 8 were available. That 8GB was about the size of the first primary partition prior to the install (yes, fdisk definitely deleted the partitions and I definitely saved at exit). fdisk also reported 2 partitions of unknown type and 0 size as well as one where the ending sector was before the starting sector. I couldn't delete these partitions or extend the 'good' ones.

Ended up I had to backup, blow away and re-partition with a 3rd party tool and re-install, this time with Slackware although I doubt that had anything to do with it.

I would *very* quickly back up anything I cared about, ensure the BIOS was set to LBA (AUTO should work too), and blow it all away.
Looks seriously fsck'd up to me.

If it was my box I'd go play around in the partition table, and the first couple of sectors within the extended, but I'm not going to attempt to describe how.
Just back it up and start over.

Fedora and Mandrake had some issues with parted early on in 2.6, but all should be o.k. now. I had the early Mandrake 10 code chew up a partition table so bad it was inaccessable. Cost me a re-install of two systems.

Agreed - backup any important data, then drop the mutant partitions and redefine them. Good luck with it

Luckily I do have a back up from 2 weeks ago already, so I just deleted both hda3 and hda4..when I deleted hda4 hda5 disappeared as well, so I believe that that was the problem. Drives running smooth now, thanks guys.

Cool - thanks for posting back with the followup spicyed

i was refering to my cfdisk info-- which i guess is pretty up2date.. but who noze :/

i was calculating from win95 lba (0F), down 6 on cfdisk chart, which would be f6 (if it wasn't called l7 ;)

i know, sometimes i'm a little 'too' nerdy even for my own sanity :(

Friendly warning - don't confuse symptom with problem.
hda4 was an extended partition - nothing more than a container for every logical partition you define. If you get into the habit of deleting extended partitions whilst it still contains other (logical) partitions, you are eventually going to be extremely pissed off.
Was a solution this time, but multiple partitions occupying the same extent is not necessarily/usually a problem where they are logical(s) within extended.

halvy:
I believe you'll find the (M$oft) hidden partitions are x'10' higher than the equivalent non-hidden.

ok, soooo how do we explain the weird f6 (not even capitalized)..

at least i may have 'theoreticaly' answered that one..

(come on guys, humor me) lol :)

Don't know, don't care - anything that hosed up ain't worth the worry.
I'd write it off as a one-off; or "never happened" maybe.