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

[Michael Hirsch]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 8:55 PM, Steven Vollom
<stevenvollom at sbcglobal.net> 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.

Are you doing this as root, or as a regular user?  It sounds to me
like you don't have the proper permissions, not that the disk is
corrupted.

What are you trying to do with this partition?  Is it already mounted?
 I gather it already has data and you are trying to access that data?

Useful commands to run and post the output are (I'm assuming here that
your hard drive is /dev/sda--change as appropriate):
cat /etc/fstab
mount
sudo parted /dev/sda print

These will tell us what partitions your system is trying to make
avaliable, what partitions it did make available, and what partitions
are available.  It's difficult to figure out what is happening without
a lot more information.

Michael