By viewing my Disk&File Systems in Hardy, can anyone see why one HDD is partially crippled?

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 20 November 2008, Steven Vollom wrote:
>Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Wednesday 19 November 2008, Steven Vollom wrote:
>>> For over a year, the HDD that my current OS is on, has had its larger
>>> partition unusable.  My system is Hardy KDE3.5.10.
>>> The HDD is an 80gb Maxtor.  20gb was partitioned with ext3 and made
>>> primary.  My current version of Hardy in on that partition.  The balance
>>> is 58gb according to Dolphin, and is unusable and empty.  When I click
>>> on the vacant HDD, it says 'Permissin Denied'.  I would like to use the
>>> empty space.  Additionally, I have a vacant area, 14gb, for another OS
>>> that is unusable on a 200gb Maxtor HDD.  I wanted to put Intrepid on it
>>> to get some experience.  The balance of the drive is used for storage in
>>> two other partitions, one 68gb, the other 119gb.  I did not attach the
>>> screen print, because I am pretty sure it exceeds the size limit of the
>>> 'List', however, I can send it to your email address for viewing.  If
>>> you have a solution for my problem, I will figure a way to describe the
>>> resolution of the problem and post that on the List, so others may learn
>>>
>> >from it.  TIA.
>>>
>>> Steven
>>
>> I would start this little procedure by running 'badblocks' on both oif
>> those drives to see if they are usable.  I have a 160 and a 200, both
>> maxtors here, and I don't think badblocks would be happy with either.
>
>How do I run badblocks, explain like I know nothing at all, please.

Its a separate download I believe, so you may have to go get it.

Then its a read the manpage to see how you want to run it.  I would set it to 
generate an output file you can keep & read, also it can be fed back to 
setblocks, which will force the drive to mark them as bad & reallocate a new 
sector from its spares, until it run out of spares anyway.

>> Then if the data on them isn't precious, I'd just use fdisk to repartition
>> them as you see fit.
>
>It isn't precious, but I don't want to lose it if not necessary.  I am
>building a new computer.  Can I transfer the data to it, or will it
>corrupt a new HDD?

Not if the drive is already prepared, formatted and properly mounted, see man 
mount for how to do that.  You will need to make a directory in either /media 
or /mnt on the original drive, and then "mount -t ext3 /dev/sd? /mnt/dirname.
At that point you should see a listing of the drive and its free space with 
the command 'df'.

I've had some problems using cp to copy binaries and prefer to use something 
like mc for making a copy to another already formatted drive.  Or you can 
make a tar.gz out of the data, which will shrink it quite a bit & then copy 
the *tar.gz file to the other drive before unpacking it on that drive with a 
tar xzf your.tar.gz.

See the man pages for tar and gzip to make the compressed archive.

>Thanks for the help.
>Steven



-- 
Cheers, Gene
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