And I need to do this in order to run gparted, which starts (using libparted: 2.3) and then hangs.

I was advised to disable floppy but when I try the Bios key for disabling (shift+1) I get no indication as to whether or not it is disabled, though I have managed to "exclude" it from the start-up list.

Thnx in advance,
Tex

You'll need to supply some info about your system; Desktop/laptop, manufacturer,motherboard, etc, as to disable anything in the BIOS means you're configuring stuff prior to there being any loaded Operating System.

Who advised to disable the floppy as I don't think GParted should care about it?

Play Bonny!

Sorry Soady, I wasted your time. It was,in fact, a case of needing to disable floppy in bios: once I worked out how to do that, gparted started without a hitch.

However, I still find fault with gparted as it reads my 16GB flash drive as "unallocated", which is wrong, as evidenced by the following input/output:

I am running slackware on one partition, mint 14 on a second, booting from second in grub and accessing both now, finally! after days of struggle to understand how lilo and grub were at war with each other.

But now my current problem is to get my machine to boot from the usb drive: i have put it at top of priority list in Bios, but perhaps i have to add something to my fstab settings?

Thanks for taking the time,
cheers,
Tex