What happens if you forget to create a primary partition?

[Markus Schönhaber]

Alexandra Zaharia:

> I bought a Western Digital 1 TB external HDD. I had some file system
> creation errors...
> 
> I'll skip the details.
> 
> Long story short, I was trying different partition sizes combinations
> and at some point during the night I was sleepy and created a 1 TB
> *extended* partition from gparted without creating any primary one.
> 
> Would that be the cause for rendering my disk useless?

No, I don't think so.

> And by useless I mean really, totally, terminally useless: I can't
> even see anything for it when I plug it in (via the USB interface) in
> /var/log/messages.

No matter how you partitioned the drive, the kernel should still, at
least, report the plugged in USB device.

Depending on what those "file system creation errors" exactly were, they
may already have been symptoms of a drive going faulty.

The first thing I'd do is change the USB cable. If that doesn't improve
things, I'd try to connect the drive to another machine. If it's not
working there either, I'd contact the vendor for replacement.

-- 
Regards
  mks