gparted question

Red Squirrel

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Has anyone had any issues with this program badly reporting bad sectors? I've been trying to resize my C drive so its bigger but have nasty luck, since partition magic wont work with sata drives (older version) so I looked around and found gparted which does, but it reported bad sectors, so I got a new hard drive, reimaged from old, its BRAND NEW, and it's STILL reporting bad sectors. So could it be reporting wrong? I hope so, since I told myself I was done spending money for a while...
 

Nothinman

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If there really are bad blocks there should be error messages in the kernel log like "Buffer I/O error on device hda, logical block 882724". And you can always run badblocks on the device yourself and see what it says.
 

Red Squirrel

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I did a test with the western digital tools, and no bad sectors, so I think its the program missreporting the sectors. So that said, another other good partition managers out there? I'm using it for Windows drives, but one that can do both is even better. Gparted works great in VMware but so far no luck using it with real hard drives.
 

Nothinman

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gparted works fine on real drives, if it's saying you have bad blocks then something is up with your system. It could really be bad blocks or it could just be something like bad cables or interference. Did you even look at the kernel log?
 

Red Squirrel

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Theres no kernel log, that I know of. I looked for that option or even an option to bypass looking for bad blocks.

This is a brand new drive. The manufacturer tool test past ok.
 

Brazen

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Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
Theres no kernel log, that I know of. I looked for that option or even an option to bypass looking for bad blocks.

This is a brand new drive. The manufacturer tool test past ok.

Nothinman is saying it might not be your drive. It could be something else in your system and gparted is confusing it with bad blocks. I've used gparted many many times on many different systems and never had a problem with it. In my experience, there are 3 possibilities when a hard drive is reported as bad:

1. the hard drive is bad
2. the ide cable is bad
3. the motherboard is bad

Since you've already tried a new driver, my guess is the problem is either 2 or 3. I've yet to experience this on a SATA drive, but you can substitute SATA for IDE in my number 2 ;)

As far as partitioning tools go, any free one is probably going to be based on parted (which is the program that does the actual partitioning behind gparted). Parted is very mature and has widespread use, so I would have a hard time believing the problem is with gparted.
 

Red Squirrel

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Where would I type that? If you mean in the actual OS installed on the drive, its Windows. Or is there a way in gparted to get to a shell?
 

Nothinman

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dmesg is a Linux kernel command so you'd obviously type it from whatever LiveCD you're running gparted from.
 

Red Squirrel

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Not running it off a live CD, gparted is its own bootable program. Well guess it could quality as a live CD, but its not a full blown Linux distro, its just a program that boots off a CD and is Linux based. Like, I don't have to login or anything, nor do I have a shell or desktop.
 

Nothinman

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Unless you found some special version that has a built-in kernel the gparted LiveCD is very much a normal Linux LiveCD, it just happens to be stripped down to fit inside of ~50M. Kind of ironic that it's based on Gentoo as well.
 

Red Squirrel

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Just found that the buttons on top actualy work. For some reason they never did all the other times I tried, they just acted like static images, so figured it was just decoration.

So there IS a way to get a terminal. But anyway, this is the error I get.

http://www.iceteks.com/misc/gparted.jpeg


It's impossible that it has bad sectors since I did a full scan with seatools, and its a brand new drive. It also can't scan the entire 350GB volume in 1 second when the sea tools takes a good hour or so.


I managed to resize it though, I imaged the drive with acronis, then did a restore and it gives an option to resize it. Using acronis for partitioning is not as practical,though.