[PLUG] Partition confusion

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Mar 19 16:29:33 UTC 2007


I have a 160 GB external USB drive. Until now it has been hanging on my
Windows 2000 desktop. When I acquired the drive over a year ago I used
the disk utility in Windows 2000 to create two NTFS partitions of ~75
GB. I have decided I want to move it back and forth between the Windows
desktop and my Linux laptop, each of which would have a partition it
could recognize to use for backups. Therefore, I want to reformat the
second partition as ext3.

This morning I moved it to the Linux laptop, where gparted recognized
it as /dev/sdf and said it had 1019 MiB unallocated. Gparted saw no
other partitions. I googled, and apparently MiB are mebibytes, which is
close to the same thing as a megabyte, so gparted was saying there was
about 1 GB unallocated. I'll leave the issue of why we need a new term
that no one understands for a later philosophical discussion.

Figuring that the 1 GB unallocated was just some left over space, I
moved it back to the Windows 2000 desktop and deleted the second
partition. Then I brought it back to the laptop, where gparted still
says there is 1019 MiB unallocated. Gparted is not seeing the remaining
NTFS partition, and is lying about the unallocated space. However, I
selected the 1019 MiB and clicked on New, to see what would happen if I
tried to create a new disk label. Gparted said that a new disk label
was required in order to create a partition and that setting one would
delete all data from /dev/sdf. This isn't making any sense to me at
all. I don't care if gparted and Linux can't see the NTFS partition,
but how can I get it to recognize the correct free space so I can
create a partition on it and format it ext3?



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