I have a problem with a spare slave harddisk with partitions named hdb1,hdb2,hdb3 earlier carrying a distro.

I wanted to use this as pure data disk with only one big partition of 13GB.

I opened qtparted and chose to delete hdb1.

Now nothing more can be done on hdb, neither resizing nor formatting or deleting.

How do I get on?

(SimplyMEPIS 3.3 kernel 2.6.10)

2 commands:

'man mke2fs' and 'man fdisk'

See how you go.

i find cfdisk much easier to use than fdisk, also on my system (slackware) there is mkfs.* where * is the name of the filesystem to use

well, I was looking for som e experienced help so feel free to join in

Now qtparted shows one big partition of 13gb where 600 is used, although it was formatted to ext3 in qtp.

Somehow it's like qtp does not show what fdisk does.

Besides I am not allowed to place any data on the parition (mounted).

I had a similar issue. The problem turned out to be the jumpers on the HD. It was set to cable-select, rather than slave. Probably not your problem, but cant hurt to check.

It worked fine untill I deleted the said partition, now I and root am not allowed to enter.

Anyone knowing anything about setting up harddisks?

You need to unmount the drive and reformat it from scratch using mke2fs... something like the following (check the man pages, i'm at work and can't check this for myself to confirm)

$ umount /dev/hdx (where 'x' is the letter of your HDD)

$ mke2fs /dev/hdx <parameters_if_needed>

Once a disk has been formatted and partitioned, it is almost impossible to change these partitions without losing data (some programs like Partition Magic can do it but that is a Windows program). Your best option is just to start from scratch, reformat and create one big partition... it's not that hard.

$ mke2fs /dev/hdb

after this command root can enter and delete data in what looks like a whole 13GB partition.

But even though I have chown and chmod 777 to user, the user can't save or delete files in /dev/hdb/data

I guess I can live with a sole root partition, but it's pretty weird anyway.

the expereniced help says RTFM

but i could just show you

make the partitions the way you like em and write it, dont just quit when done

then check is your new partitions exist in /dev (/dev/hdb*), they should, but if they dont then just reboot as that works for me

the to format

then mount it

Did that and rebooted.

No change. root can paste a file.

I am logged in as root. I have to select: 'Unmount as root', not only 'unmount' (stilled logged in as root)
Error message: /mnt/hdb1: not mounted, please chech the disk is entered correctly.

Doing cd /mnt/hdb and /dev/hdb1: 'No such file or fiule catalog

fstab:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0


mtab mounted:
/dev/hda1 / ext3 rw,noatime 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,mode=0622,gid=100,mode=0622 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,devmode=0666 0 0
/dev/hda3 /home ext3 rw,noatime 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ext3 rw 0 0

This is no standard trouble free procedure.