toosh Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 (edited) I have just installed Mandrake 10.0, moved from SUSE 9.0, and have a continueing issue. I have Maxtor hard drive that is roughly 60GB installed and mounted as /dev/hdb1 -> one partition that spans the entire drive. The problem is that when using any sort of file browsing and for file storage pueposes the OS is only giving me about half of the drive and for all purpose the outher 30Gigs just aren't there. Now I've used any utility I can get my handds onto to investigate this drive, the latest was Parted, and all show a the full drive with the single partition spanning the entire hard drive. So I am at a loss as to how I can use the other 30gigs... Any suggestions would be nice. I've recently done a BIOS upgrade to cover that end and made sure the jumpers on the drive didn't set is at a limited usage volume. Thanks for any help you can provide. Ok, little update. when I tried to use check in Parted, I got a warning saying the partition was 60 gigs but the file system was only 29 gigs. how'd this happen and is there a way to fix it with out loosing the data on the drive? Edited August 17, 2004 by toosh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 Are the utilities reporting 60G? Does the bios report 60G? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toosh Posted August 17, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 Are the utilities reporting 60G? Does the bios report 60G? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> both report the full amount... check my edit to the original post... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 17, 2004 Report Share Posted August 17, 2004 I noticed a similar thing when I restored an imaged partition to a partition larger than the original using partimage. The reported size of the partition corresponded to the size of the original partition. Backed up my data and ran a few experiments on the partition. What I found was that I could write to the partition beyond the stated size limit and that as I did so the reported size of the partition increased to correspond to the amount of data on the partition. For example the original partition was 10GB and I restored the partition to a 20GB partition. The size was reported as 10GB. I copied enough data on to the partition to fill up 15GB and it let me do so and afterwards reported the size as 15GB. I suspect I could fill up the entire 20GB and the size reported would keep increasing to the amount of data on the partition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toosh Posted August 18, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 18, 2004 Well, I had first noticed the problem when I reached the upper bound for the file systems MB limit. my ripping application wouldn't allow me to ripp, and I couldn't move files onto the drive.. so based on my initial experience I don't think I have this option to just keep pooring in data to the drive in hopes that the register size will increase with volume. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toosh Posted August 21, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 21, 2004 ok, I was able to back up my data across the other HD in my mandrake box and my XP box in the netwrok. I did this in hopes of being able to either resize the partition and get some response, or just to remake the partition. So, resizin with Parted failed , gave my a message that Parted couldn't resize because the partition had an "unusual layout". So I instead decided it was time for brute force, I supposedly deleted the partition then made a new one, how ever, the supposedly new partition had all the same data in it, which I though was strange since I was prety darn sure I deleted the partition.... What is going on? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 21, 2004 Report Share Posted August 21, 2004 The partition table is corrupted would be my guess. How much data do you have on the entire drive and can you back it up someplace else? Do you have error messages on any other partitions with "# fdisk -l"? How many drives do you have on your system(is this the only one)? One thing I would do is check the integrity of the drive with the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities and back everything up on that drive. If you google around a bit you can find some utilities which attempt to fix a buggered partition table but I wouldn't even try that without a full backup of the entire drive. As a last resort, you can always zero fill the drive with the manufacturer's utilities and repartition and reformat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toosh Posted August 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 23, 2004 I tried to use a utility from Maxtor but it wouldn't boot up with the disk I made so I did't bother. I ended up being able to delete the partition table and the partition and then repartition the drive with parted. This time however the new partition took and the file system did span the entire drive (yay). I did back up the contents of the drive to another drive on the machine and across my lan to my windows box, all in all about 26 GB. So I retained all my data, just have the hassle of moving it back. I had Parted do a check on the drive but it came back clean. Oh well.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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