BleepingComputer.com: Gparted Problems

Hi, Linux lions. I'm not sure if I should post this here or in the Live Linux forum. Probably over there, as it involves a gparted live CD, but ...

The hard drive which I've been trying for days to configure still seems to have odds and ends of at least one distro of Linux on it. I haven't had any luck with Redo MBR or Manage Partitions using my PCLOS CD.

So now I'm trying gparted live. I'm getting all kinds of errors.

ata1: link is slow to respond
ata1: SRST failed errno 16
ata1: soft resetting link
DRDY and UNC errors ...

Any suggestions at all on how to wipe or rebuild this drive would be so appreciated, even if it's not tried and true. Absolutely nothing is working. I think there is at least one bad sector on the drive from corrupted data writing, but I have to reason just from listening to the drive and knowing that it experienced no physical trauma to think that there's anything mechanically wrong with it.

Thanks so much in advance.

Haven't tried it myself...but Darik's Boot&Nuke is supposed to be very good at wiping hard drives.

http://www.dban.org/

This post has been edited by mrfingerz: 15 May 2011 - 02:17 PM

Thank you, Mr. I thought, *thought* I had wiped the drive via PCLOS, but it doesn't seem to be that way.

Do you think that once it's wiped for sure, I should be able to redo the MBR and partitions, and maybe install PCLOS?

Thanks.

Hopefully. I tried PCLOS on a live cd not that long ago and couldn't get it to run at all (on an old computer).

Ubuntu runs fine on the same computer. Like I say I haven't had to use Boot&Nuke yet. It does sound like it destroys everything in it's path though.

Good luck, be interesting to know how you get on.

This post has been edited by mrfingerz: 15 May 2011 - 02:45 PM

Thanks much. I'll surely give it a try.

BTW, I can't run Ubuntu live at all on my old computer (HP Pavilion, early 2002). I've tried Mint also, and I think that caused many of my problems of having remnants. PCLOS will run ... slowwwwllllyyyyyyyy ... but I can't get the system utilities to do much, if anything.

Thanks again.

You could try PuppyLinux.

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm

That looks cool! Thanks again.

I've tried live cd of it, it's very good. Definitely worth a go. As it runs in RAM it should work even if the hard drive is toast.

This post has been edited by mrfingerz: 15 May 2011 - 02:59 PM

I'm exploring Puppy now. It's definitely much faster than the other live CDs. Gparted is running via the Puppy CD. Running and running and *running.* I don't know if there even are any partitions on this drive any more. I've tried to run and/or install so many programs, I'm sure anything on it is very corrupt.

I'm just hoping that Puppy or the DBAN or something, somewhere, will give me some way to scan the drive and try to repair bad sectors/clusters, like chkdsk would in Windows.

I'm not totally sure what you're trying to achieve, but Parted Magic has a varied selection of tools, including Gparted and reformat/bad sector check ability. You can read about that here.

I know that I have at least one bad sector/cluster. I want to find and repair it or skip over it, so that I can actually install Linux, absolutely any distro would be fine right now, just to get my HDD rebuilt and bootable.

I burned the Pmagic CD, but haven't made much progress with it. I'll try it again. The reformat/bad sector check is definitely what I need first, as I can't get any distro to install. Gparted on the Puppy CD has only told me that the drive is unallocated, which I knew. It throws errors when trying to create a partition table, but it doesn't say what or why. I imagine it's the bad sector(s).

Thanks for the link. Hopefully it'll guide me toward some good progress. I really do like Puppy also. I couldn't even run Gparted from its own CD nor from Pmagic, so Puppy has helped me a lot there.

Thanks again.

You're welcome, hopefully it will help you get something installed that boots.

When booting pmagic, I'm now getting:

EDD Error 8000 reading sector 82896

I posted it to the pmagic forum. I've pestered you good people enough. There HAS to be a way to get me to that sector and any other damaged sectors and tell a disk tool to skip them! Somehow, someway, someday. Argghhhh.