Gparted does not detect partitions...

jmite · 04-12-2009, 06:15 PM

This is a weird problem. Everything on my computer is working fine. Ubuntu 8.10 boots and works fine. However, in gparted, and in the Jaunty LiveCD, none of my partitions are detected, but are called unallocated space. I can mount them fine in Nautilus, and via CLI, but I can't access them to format them. Any way to fix this? It would be nice if the Ubuntu Installer could detect them so I can install 9.04 when it comes out...

This is the output of fdisk -l

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x92cd386f

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 38588 38914 2619392 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 6 758 6045692 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 759 38914 306481159 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 38588 38914 2619392 dd Unknown
/dev/sda6 759 4527 30274429+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 6623 7144 4192933+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 7145 10791 29294496 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 10792 12007 9767488+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 37372 38587 9767488+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda11 12008 37371 203736298+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda12 4584 6622 16378236 83 Linux
/dev/sda13 4528 4583 449788+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

maresmasb · 04-12-2009, 06:29 PM

The message "Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary" indicates that this is not only a somewhat unusual disk layout, but that it is not completely following safe-ide rules for partitioning. Maybe that is the problem that some higher level tools like GParted fail on it, even though it works in general.

I once had a Linux box with a lot of partitions, but usually up to 5 partitions should be enough for Linux.

jay73 · 04-12-2009, 06:51 PM

Did the disk show an unallocated area of 7.84MB that did not seem to have any point? And did you decide to delete it for that reason? That would certainly be one explanation. I had the same problem myself not too long ago. I had created an extended partition at the end of a drive, leaving several dozens of gigabytes of unallocated space between second primary and extended. All looked fine except there was this mysterious 7.84MB of unallocated space at the start of the extended partition - and it just kept reappearing no matter how often I recreated the logical partition that I had already created inside the extended one. As I got fed up, I then moved the extended partition to the front so that it took up the gigabytes of free space and I created a new partition to take up all of the unallocated space. And BAM! Gparted started reporting the whole drive as unallocated space although fdisk was still working fine.
As it turned out, this is a confirmed bug in gparted. Nothing wrong with the drive, it's the partitioning program. Unfortunately, I was advised that the only way of restoring gparted to working order was to undo the steps that had caused it to fail. In short, I had to delete the latest logical partition I had created and move the extended partition back to its original position. This again left me with the 7.84MB of unallocated space but at least gparted is working again.