Posted: 11/3/2005 8:22:31 PM EDT
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I bought an enclosure so I could get some use out of an old 3.2gb Toshiba laptop 2.5" hdd. Not huge, but useful, and decently fast on USB2.0. So I installed the drive, that worked fine. I forgot that I had it partitioned out for some linux experiments I was doing--so the main Windows drive was about 1.5 gigs. That was fine, I copied the whole directory out to burn to DVD and then set about re-partitioning the drive. I used Windows XP's system manager to re-partition the drive. Well, I almost re-partitioned it. Every time I clicked on a partition and told it to delete, it would return an error and tell me to go look at the system log to see what the error is. (I didn't look at the log...now I wish I had, but I rebooted into linux...) So I tried rebooting, and now system manager doesn't even SEE the drive. At all. So I booted into linux. Now, linux sees my partitions--but it won't let me use fdisk to repartition the drive. I can see it, I can use the partitions, but I just can't change them. Is this some artifact of this drive being in a USB enclosure? Do I need to go drag out a laptop, install the drive, and work on it with an XP boot disk? Oh, yeah, Toshiba appears to be the ONLY COMPANY that doesn't make some sort of system tools available for their drives.  Help? |
| no thats somewhat normal not being able to get rid of linux partitions ... just get the data you need and then low level format the harddrive . dban is a program I use occasionaly |
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This thing is being a right bitch. I pulled it from the external drive, pulled the upgrade drive from my laptop, and installed this one into the laptop. FDISK just FCHOKES. Get this, I have no primary partition, but I DO have an extended DOS partition. So I delete the partition in FDISK, exit, and it says it can't update the partition table because the disc is write protected. WTF? I'm going after it with TomsRTBT, then the Ultimate Boot CD, then Damn Small Linux to try some of the Linux partitioning utilities. I have a DBAN diskette around here somewhere, so that'll be my next attempt after DSL. *pulling hair out* I bought the housing to get something useful out of an otherwise useless drive, and now I'm wasting time trying to get it to work...because I don't want to have a useless drive AND a useless housing sitting around. Jim |
Fixed it! I thought DBAN did the trick, but then I still couldn't partition the drive...new error sequence, but the write protect error popped up again. Then I though "Crap, I wonder if I have the BIOS virus protection enabled...". Turns out that FDISK /MBR followed by FDISK does the trick, once I turned off the MBR write protect in the BIOS.  Well, anyway, I now have my functioning external no-power-supply-needed USB drive. Only $9, plus four hours of my time screwing with it. I won't bother to compute the fact that I could have just bought an external drive, when you count the value of my time.  I guess that's why it's partly a hobby... Jim ETA: This was all done with the drive installed in my old laptop. I decided it wasn't worth the additional trouble of trying to figure out what problems were related to the drive, and what problems were related to the USB bridge to IDE and the associated drivers. |