Ubuntu :: Tell Kernel To Reread Partition Table While One Partition Mounted
Feb 5, 2010
Is there a program that will reread the partition table and update the kernel even if one of the unmodified partitions is mounted? I installed my system on one partition, then I added another with free space. Now I want to format the second partition, but the kernel doesn't know about it yet. I tried sfdisk -R /dev/sda, but it refuses while the root partition is mounted. Is there anyway I can avoid rebooting?
When I start gparted, to see if I can add extra harddisk where all my data is, I get the next error:
Code: [root# gparted libparted : 1.9.0
The kernel was unable to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). This means Linux won't know anything about the modifications you made until you reboot. You should reboot your computer before doing anything with /dev/sda. I can start fedora 12 x64 amd whitout any problem. My partition layout on a single disk (80 gb sata maxtor) for the system is: Code: / /home swap
When I try to mount one of the extra disks (samsung spinpoint 1 tb, I have 4) I get to next error: Code: root# mount /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 mount: you must specify the filesystem type
If I add the option with the filesystem I get: Code: root# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
In gparted, when I select just a flag option, and deselect, press ok, the disk is forced to be reread by the program. After that I can also mount it. When I use any of the programs linked in this post, I am able to mount the disks whitout any problem. Except after a reboot, I get the same problem. SO whit each reboot, or poweroff, I need to do a re-read of the disks. The system is fedora 12 x64 for amd, installed from a live cd, the rest whit yums groupinstall, the latest kernel.
I want to change my sda2 partition to ntfs type. i have installed GParted but it is returning a strange type of error. Here is the error dump file...
[Code]...
WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot. WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot.
Is there a difference between using GPT partition table when formating hard drives and MS-DOS partition table? What are the advantages/disadvantages of using either?
I was installing opensuse 11.2 in parallel with windows xp.but during installation suddenly power has gone and after that opensuse is giving me the error message corrupt partition.i am also not able to login in xp. so I decide to reinstall windows, I got the error saying "invalid partition table" after the first restart of windows xp installation.
I tried to use windows system recovery console and committing fixmbr and fixboot commands, but didn't work. i have 2 window partition(1 for windows and 1 for data).i do,nt want to format 2,nd partition.
How can I installed windows?My plan was first to install windows xp, then opensuse again.
I have tried to automate the configuration of a usb drive with not much success.
The problem that I have is that I have a large amount of usb drives that have a partition table of type "loop" and I need to change them to "msdos". The size of the drives vary and I need to use FAT32 or FAT16 file system.
I've tried various partitioning commands and gui applications but cant find one that I can give a one line command to to set the partition table, maximum partition size and file system.
I was reading another thread about someone with a bad partition table and I decided to join this forum. I'm not going to take any drastic actions with the partition (/dev/sda3) in question. I am going to wait for instructions on what to do first. I am not very good with Linux and need some hand holding. System: DELL 4550 Dual-Booted with XP and Ubuntu. Works OK, just no swap. Well, here's what I did: I deleted a partition for Windows XP Pro because it was a trial, and it ran out. I then decided to slide the swap partition for the Ubuntu Linux that I dual-boot into over. (If this was successful, I was going to try expanding the root partition to take up the unused space.) I used Gparted on a CD to do this, as I figured it was safe to do.
I now cannot mount the swap space at bootup (and have to go into a backup version of the OS), although I can use Gparted in Linux to execute the "swapon" command, and it appears that it worked because I now see "swapoff" as an option on the context menu. (I actually don't even need a swap partition, except to hibernate.) If I highlight the swap partition and click on "Drive" on Gparted's menu bar and select "Create Partition Table", it will erase all data on /dev/sda, so how do I fix the bad partition table non-destructively?
Everything is installed and setup on my system, but when I setup my partitions I chose my Windows partition to be bootable. Can I just use cfdisk to toggle the bootable flag so my linux partition is bootable and rewrite the partition table?
What I believe has happened is that I've corrupted the partition table. Essentially one of my partitions' ending point exceeds the maximum number of cylinders/sectors on my drive.
Essentially I have the same problem as on the thread @ [url] but do not know how to fix this and am afraid to reformat/partition based on sectors without really knowing what I'm doing here.
[code]...
When I try to look at SDA in GParted everything shows up as unallocated (though it's obviously not) and it says
In my efforts to resize my BTRFS Partition, I accidentally unmarked my BTRFS partition as being BTRFS, and can't mark it back as I can't find the numeric ID for BTRFS and how to apply.
USB flash disk partition disappeared as well as partition table I'm not sure about the cause
Code:
root@u# less /var/log/syslog usb 5-1: New USB device found, idVendor=058f, idProduct=1234 usb 5-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[code]....
Where did the partition table go? The device had one ext3 partition something around 4GB(size of USB storage device). I need to restore few files from this device.
I'm trying to clone a Linux install to a different laptop. It's made a little complicated by two facts:
1) The 'new' laptop I'm trying to copy my Linux installation to is actually older and has a smaller hard drive then the computer I'm copying from
2) The computer I'm copying from has both a windows and Linux installation; I only care about the Linux partition.
I figured I would copy only the Linux partition from my primary computer to the laptop, sense the laptop doesn't have a large enough hard drive to copy everything. So I used the DD commands to copy SDA3 (main Linux partition) from my main computer to SDA2 of my laptop. When I came back a few hours later I was surprise to find my laptop trying to reboot itself (I never turned it off). It would keep starting to reboot, failing, and restarting itself. Not too surprising sense its boot partition wasn't changed so it's trying to boot into centos when I copied a redhat partition to it.
The problem is that when I used a redhat boot disk the rescue mode was unable to find a Linux partition to mount. /dev/sda2 exists, but trying to mount it gets the complaint "No such file or directory". "fdisk -l" lists sda1 (the boot sector) and sda2. Sda2 is the correct size and reports Linux LVM for its system. But "fdisk -l /dev/sda2" gives the error message "Disk /dev/sda2 doesn't contain a valid partition table" Did I not clone the drive correctly, or was an error caused due to the boot sector not being copied yet (the laptops boot sector is smaller then my old computers, so I can't copy from old computer to laptop)? Can I salvage the laptops partition table somehow, or do I have to repeat the cloning process? And if I do have to re-clone my computer can anyone tell me what I did wrong the first time so it works this time? I don't care if I copy just the Linux partition or both windows and Linux. Even though my main computer has a larger hard drive I'm only using about half of its available space so it should be possible to copy both partitions if I could ignore the unused sections of the harddrive.
Edit: I used DD to copy a tiny part of the Linux partition from my laptop so I could look at it. Most of it is illegible binary of course, but I scrolled through till I found some text right near the beginning:
Code:
VolGroup00 { id="F2MWxh-....-BidcLe" seqno = 1
[code]....
So it seems that the DD command did copy everything over to the laptop, which is good to know. I noticed that it says device="/dev/sda3" right in the middle of the code I just posted. The Linux section of my original computer was SDA3 but I copied it to partition SDA2 of my laptop. So is the problem because the boot partition is for the wrong device? I don't suppose if I modified that one line to say SDA2 it would be able to load correctly? (Not that I know how I would modify the line, short of using the DD command again).
using suse 11.3 and kde 4.4.4 on the mounted fat32 partition I cannot change icons partition is mounted in fstab in this way:/dev/sda8/ /dati vfat user, users, gid=users, umask=0002, utf8=true, 0, 0.I can create files folders modify, move and save them on the partition but if I try to change the icon (in dolphin right click>properties>click on icon) of the /eros folder (or any other folder or link) system gives me this error:impossibile salvare le proprieta' , non hai accesso sufficiente per scrivere su /dati/eros/.directory tha in english is something like this: impossoble save properties, you havent enough permission access to write on /dati/eros/.directory this happen also as superuser I remember that with suse 11.0 or 10.3 I was able to change icons on fat32 partitions, now with 11.3 I cannot, there ought to be a way to do what I did with the previous version with this 11.3 brand new ad more advanced version shouldn't it?
I installed Ubuntu as shown in the wiki and when I went to restart it gave me a lovely blinking cursor and nothing else. So I held down option, loaded into osx, reinstalled rEFIt and got my menu on startup. Unfortunately, the partition sync tool doesn't seam to be working, it gives me an error: Status: MBR partition table is invalid, partitions overlap. Error: Not Found returned from gptsync.efi
I originally had an Ubuntu partition on my hard drive which occupied about half of it. I installed Windows 7 in the remaining unallocated space and I was planning on doing a grub update from a live cd afterwards. BUT when I looked at my partition table, the space where the ubuntu partition used to be is now unallocated space!
I got swap space full error and the ubuntu version of "blue screen of death". I used Disk Utilities to delete a 2.1GB unused partition. When I tried to create a swap space partition (with Disk Utilities) it failed. In the mean time ubuntu did some security updates. When I tried to create again Disk Uilities did not complain but only created a small ~ 500 kB partition. I deleted that and reboot and got "unknown filesystem grub rescue>". I booted from a USB key successfully. Now Disk Utilities and File Browser can see all the partitions and files on the hard drive, but GParted thinks the entire hard drive is unallocated. I vaguely remember that there are two partition table on the hard drive. It may be that one of them was deleted (when I removed the ~ 500 kB partition with Disk Utilities earlier maybe?). It seems at least the other partition table is still intact since Disk Utilities and File Browser can still see all the partitions and files. Is it possible to restore the deleted or damaged partition table and make the hard drive bootable again?
I Inadvertently deleted a good partition while trying to clean up after a 10.10 update install failure that left grub broken and prevented me from using my working Linux partition. (installed 10.4 in a new partition) Used testdisk to restore the deleted partition which resulted in the entire partition table being wiped out.All partions are gone, win Xp, 2 Linux partitions, 2 Linux swap partitions.Testdisk deep search does see the partitions but will not recreate the table.
Is their anything I am doing wrong in Testdisk that it won't write the table?Nothing else has been written to the disk.I very carefully recorded the partition information - is their any way to manually enter?
My problem isn't directly related to ubuntu or linux, but I figured that my best chance at a fix would be on ubuntu forums. The problem is that every time I reboot my computer, my partition table gets destroyed. I tried fixing it with testdisk and gparted, but as soon as I rebooted, everything is back to broken. So far I've troubleshooted to the point where I know it's not an operating system's fault. I'm hoping it's nothing more severe than a bad hard drive.
I have searched and didnt find a situation like mine so i thought id ask. i have a dual boot setup on my hp pavillion windows vista /dev/sda1 and backtrack linux 3,while trying to install backtrack 4 (which is ubuntu based) i deleted the former partitons for bt3. im not quite sure what i clicked but using the ubiquity installer it deleted my partition table so now my entire drive is listed as unallocated space. i have some very important files on my windows partition other wise i would just format and start over. how can i restore the partition table and boot to windows to atleast grab the important stuff. the drive hasnt been formatted so the info is still there i just cant get to it anyone have any ideas?
I was working on creating a partition on a new hard drive I was planning on using for storage. I wasn't paying attention and chose to delete the partition on my master. I am running a dual boot with Vista and Ubuntu. When I rebooted It will only go to the Grub> prompt. Ive ran TestDisk and though that I had corrected the problem but it didnt. After running TestDisk again here is what It came up with.
Disk /dev/sda - 320 GB / 298 GiB - CHS 38914 255 63 Partition Start End Size in sectors L HPFS - NTFS 0 32 33 28554 254 63 458734027 L Linux 28555 1 1 38585 254 63 161147952 L Linux Swap 38586 1 1 38912 254 63 5253192 Structure: Ok. Use Up/Down Arrow keys to select partition. Use Left/Right Arrow keys to CHANGE partition characteristics: code....
After writing the table above I rebooted. Windows prompted me for my restore disk. I rebooted to the live cd again and ran Fdisk.
I upgraded Windows to 7 from Vista. My Acer laptop had a recovery partition with Vista on it. I don't know, what I was thinking, after the update I deleted the recovery partition. Then got in to problem that Partition Table is deleted. Recovered the partition and partition table with LiveUSB and gpart.
So laptop was working again in about 30mins. Now I see the following issue. Laptop boots and works fine both in Ubuntu (default OS) and Win7. In Disk Utility the partitions are shown as in attachment. In Gparted the disk is not recognized as partition table is not recognized (so I guess) Output of fdisk is here for ref;
Code: home@home-laptop:~$ sudo fdisk -l [sudo] password for home: Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 7 Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 7 Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 7
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 to an Asus EeePC 1000H (160GB HDD). (I know it will be slow because of Mutter/i945). The usb stick boots just fine but when it comes to the partition part it goes wrong.
I have 3 partitions:Windows 7 (50GB) This will be Ubuntu Netbook (50GB) DATA (60GB)
But the partition manager just shows 160GB of unallocated space. I have tried to reboot and create the partitions with other software (even with GParted LiveCD) but the result is the same.
what I did was: - have NTFS (450GB + 4GB linux-swap + 44GB ext3 with ubuntu 10.10 upgraded from ubuntu 10.4). Ntfs partition contains data only, no windows.
- either with partition magic or paragon I tried to resize the NTFS and since then parted doesn't like my partitions anymore, but Ubuntu boots and works just fine..
- I took the output from fdisk -l and decided to remove the swap partition - ubuntu won't boot saying it needs the swap (although it was never mounted and i deleted the swap while ubuntu was active)
**NOTE: Since the partitions are not on cylinder boundaries, using parted to recreate the partition table may not be good enough.. I don't have a backup of the partition table.
A few months ago I tried to shrink an NTFS partition using gparted and use the free space to install Haiku. However, gparted crashed in the middle of the resize, leading to a corrupt partition table. I tried to solve the problem myself, using testdisk to detect the partitions. However, the fix is not perfect, and it left me with a partition table that goes "outside" of the disk (i.e. the partition table has allocated more sectors than there actually are on the disk to the last partition).
Recently I need to reinstall Ubuntu Natty, but because the partition table is corrupt, the installer on the Ubuntu Natty Live CD (as well as gparted) see the disk as entirely unpartitioned. What is weird is that the Disk Utility (aka palimpsest), fdisk on my current Natty distro (upgraded from Maverick, which I want to replace with a fresh install), and GRUB 2 see the partitions fine (with some errors, such as listing a few trillion TBs of available space, a result of the corrupt partition table).
I am using an Asus U30Jc laptop with a single 500GB HDD. My current setup is supposed to be like this: /dev/sda1: A hidden FAT32 recovery partition generated by Windows 7, listed as containing Windows Vista by GRUB 2 /dev/sda2: NTFS partition containing Windows 7 (labeled "OS") /dev/sda3: Extended partition containing "DATA", Ubuntu, swap, and the erroneous trillions of TBs of space /dev/sda5: NTFS partition containing user data (labeled "DATA") /dev/sda6: Ext4 partition containing Ubuntu /dev/sda7: swap partition (*Though I'm not supposed to have it, and it isn't listed in /dev while running the Live CD, /dev/sda4 exists as a zero-length partition in the output from sfdisk; not sure why)
Currently I've tried the following: - testdisk, using "deeper search" and writing the partition table back to disk; produced a (usable) partition table that was bad. - [URL], fsck didn't do much at all, except raise various errors on all partitions except the one containing Natty. - [URL], tried to substitute the numbers caljohnsmith gave to thegreat with the corresponding values from my run of fdisk -lu, but because caljohnsmith didn't explain where the values came from and what they meant (no offense to him), I was lost; after the last step (setting the end sector on the extended partition to the last cylinder boundary (which I didn't really understand; tell me if you need details on what I did)), gparted went from showing the trillions of TBs of free space as outside all partitions to showing them as inside the extended partition; this also somehow caused the partitions to overlap.(The error parted raises changed from "Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!" to "Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.
Running fdisk from the Natty Live CD gives Code: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -lu Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x74ef0aca
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 34812854 17405403+ 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda2 * 34812855 279000854 122094000 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 279000855 976768064 348883605 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 279000918 875204030 298101556+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda6 875204608 972859391 48827392 83 Linux /dev/sda7 972861440 976771055 1954808 82 Linux swap / Solaris Running sfdisk -l from the Natty Live CD gives
Code: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo sfdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 60801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/sda1 0+ 2166 2167- 17405403+ 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda2 * 2167 17366 15200 122094000 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 17367 60800 43434 348883605 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/sda5 17367+ 54478- 37112- 298101556+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda6 54478+ 60557- 6079- 48827392 83 Linux /dev/sda7 60557+ 60801- 244- 1954808 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Running parted from the Natty Live CD gives Code: ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo parted /dev/sda print Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.
Got myself a brand new 64gb flash drive, I was partitioning it and never got it back on. Im only seeing the 7mb raw partition mounted. Thats the only thing I can see and partition! I've tried so far to create a MSDOS p.table and fdisk. It just doesnt find the 64gb
About 2 years ago I installed Ubuntu on my desktop as a dual boot with Windows XP. I am able to run either OS but, when booting, I get:Warning: Unrecognized partition table for drive 80. Please rebuild it using a Microsoft-compatible FDISK toolThe Ubuntu boot up is always successful. I am currently running Ubuntu 8.04 Is this a normal result of the Ubuntu installation partitioning? I don't want to mess with the partition table unless I know what I'm doing and maybe that warning is a red herring.
I need to copy partition table for sda, I have 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition on sda. I understand that fdisk cant copy extended partition table and I need to use sfdisk.
Correct me if I am wrong -
1. For primary partitions
Code: dd if=sda-mbr.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446 2. For extended partition Code: sfdisk -d /dev/sda2 > backup-sdX.sf Where it will store the files after backing them up. I tried SUSE 11.2 DVD, it has back up partition table utility under repairs-advanced options but it suggests saving partition table to floppy. Why it doesnt offer to save it on a removable medium or to CD.
