Hidden (?) partition doesn't show in Puppy or Gparted

Message

#1 Post by **Flash** » Mon 01 Sep 2014, 20:43

This PM showed up in my Inbox. Can anyone help him?

michaellowe wrote:Hi Flash
firstly thank you is how I always like to start my PM as its just polite.
my dilemma:

Primary Master and Slave hdd both show in BIOS and both
Mount, Master obviously has my save file etc. on it.so all good there.

however:
Secondary slave hdd shows in BIOS but does not mount even when using Pmount and Gparted utilites in Precise 5.7.1
Any ideas? Wasted 4 hours online last night before I thought I'd come and bother you guys here on the forum. Seems most people use SATA. it makes sense unless of course youre like me and use old dinosaurs as desktops
any help or pointers would be massively appreciated, what am I doinf wrong, what am I missing?
Thanks in Advance

starhawk · #2 Post by **starhawk** » Mon 01 Sep 2014, 21:01

Sounds like it's an IDE drive. If it's showing up in BIOS then it's not a jumper issue... there's really not much else to check with a symptom like that.

Probably a toast drive, I'm afraid -- does it click?

greengeek · #3 Post by **greengeek** » Mon 01 Sep 2014, 23:07

First question - does the secondary HDD contain data that the OP wants to save? If so I can't suggest anything unfortunately.

However, if he does not care about the data I would say the following:

Gparted does it's work on an UNMOUNTED drive. There are many cases where a drive is formatted in a way that prevents normal system mounting and Gparted can often get past this.

If you don't care about the data then start Gparted and see if it is able to see the drive at all. If so write a device partition table and try to delete old partitions and add new ones.

Sometimes this will fail due to the manufacturer passwording or locking out the drive as it is designed for use in a specific OEM application. I have not personally succeeded in finding a way to return such drives to normal use - there may be some utility (like spinrite?) to achieve it, but maybe not. In such cases it is the drive controller rather than media failures that prevents formatting to complete.

I do vaguely recall one drive which did not respond to gparted but did respond to fdisk - I was following a google tutorial somewhere but it was so long ago that I have no idea what exactly I did.

8-bit · #4 Post by **8-bit** » Mon 01 Sep 2014, 23:16

I had a USB hard drive, Seagate 300gig that needed special software that would ask for a password and then the drive would appear.
The drive was invisible till one used that software. There was one other option to format the drive that I used since I did not know the password.
But I had to still jump through some hoops to get the drive usable between different computers.

FeodorF · #5 Post by **FeodorF** » Mon 01 Sep 2014, 23:51

Hi,

If you have both drives connected to one ide / eide cable please separate them.

Jumper both drives as 'master-drives' and connect them to 'ide1' and 'ide2'.

As soon as you have booted f.e. Precise Puppy 5.7.1 start the utility 'Pdisk partition manager.'

It offers fdisk as a low level tool to fix hard disk problems.

#6 Post by **Flash** » Tue 02 Sep 2014, 00:40

Is it possible the drive is formatted with some weird filesystem that Puppy doesn't recognize? You didn't get it from the NSA surplus store, did you?

jafadmin · #7 Post by **jafadmin** » Tue 02 Sep 2014, 05:07

I'd try setting the suspect drive as the only drive and cable select, then boot the machine with a LiveCD and see if I can read it.

watchdog · #8 Post by **watchdog** » Tue 02 Sep 2014, 08:37

Once upon a time I bought a usb stick which had an hidden partition and cryptographic software I could not use in linux. The solution was to delete the hidden partition with a tool of ubcd (Ultimate Boot CD):

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

I only deleted the hidden partition by ubcd. Then used ubuntu's gparted to reformat the usb stick. I still have it with an old puppy into it.

wimpy · #9 Post by **wimpy** » Tue 02 Sep 2014, 09:07

There is one curious point. The PM mentions a Primary master and slave, which are both good, and then says that the Secondary slave can't be seen - no mention of the Secondary master. It is quite likely that the Secondary master is in fact a CDROM drive. My first reaction would be to swap over the Primary slave and the Secondary slave. The primary cable seems to be fine so this would determine whether the secondary cable or the drive is faulty.

Latitude · #10 Post by **Latitude** » Tue 02 Sep 2014, 12:29

I would download an earlier version of Puppy and try booting it from the CD. It's possible that the drivers in Precise 5.7.1 do not agree with the old hardware. Different drivers in a different version of Puppy could do the trick.

Lucid Puppy 528.6 can be downloaded from here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=90461

Sylvander · #11 Post by **Sylvander** » Tue 02 Sep 2014, 13:07

wimpy wrote:The PM mentions a Primary master and slave, which are both good, and then says that the Secondary slave can't be seen - no mention of the Secondary master.

My 1st thought also.
Is there any secondary master?
Is all the jumpering correctly done for all the make of HDD's?
Seems Primary Master and Slave are OK.
Master at the end of the cable and Slave in the middle?

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hidden (?) partition doesn't show in Puppy or Gparted

Hidden (?) partition doesn't show in Puppy or Gparted