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

[Jonas Norlander]

2008/11/20 Steven Vollom <stevenvollom at sbcglobal.net>:
> 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.

You can run badblocks with one of the fsck commands. If the partition
has a ext3 filesystem and is on /dev/sda2 you can run
"fsck.ext3 -cckf /dev/sda2" and the bad block scan will be done using
a non-destructive read-write test. This take a long time so run over
the night. And make sure the partition is not mounted.

There are several fsck.*** tools where *** is ext2, vfat, msdos,
reiserfs depending on the filesystem you want to scan.
You can read more on the different fsck with man.

As already advised give us the output of "sudo fdisk -l" then we can
help you with the exact command.

/ Jonas