Solved External Drive Partitions

[marqueemark]

Way back in the day when I first installed Ubuntu 10.04, I was having a lot of difficulties with it and somehow during the process I ended up with Ubuntu partitions on both of my two external hard drives. All I want to do is eliminate the partitions so that they are both just one partitions piece. This looks like it will be really simple using the "partition editor", but I've been bitten by things I thought would be simple many times so just want to be sure I'm doing it correctly. I have attached a screenshot of what i see when I bring the drive up in partition editor. How does one go about reclaiming the partition?

[vinnywright]

Re: External Drive Partitions

if thar is nothing in the "extended" parts of the partition that you nead you should be abel to delete the extended partition (witch should take the contents with it) and grow the sdg1 (ntfs) to the right to reclaim the space.
if you have windows tool's around to grow the partition use them if not well try it ware you are -(KDE partition manager)......you may want to see that you have the ntfs-3g & ntfsprogs packages installed first

or use a Gparted livecd !!

VINNY

[marqueemark]

Re: External Drive Partitions

well that cleared the data, and gave me all the space back, but all 3 partitions still exist, I shrank one down to about 2 gig, as low as it would let me, so I basically have two partitions with usable memory which is fine, I really wanted one one full terabyte on one single one though. Good enough for now.

[vinnywright]

Re: External Drive Partitions

post a screen of how it looks now?

VINNY

[marqueemark]

Re: External Drive Partitions

i've already begun moving things onto the partition, as I need to back up everything I have downloaded in the last 6 months or so. I would still appreciate advice as after the upgrade to oneiric I plan to fix it so that its all just one partition

[vinnywright]

Re: External Drive Partitions

the "extended partition is still thare ....all you did was delete the ext4 and swap and change it to ntfs?
I sead to delete the "extended"!! and grow the sdg1 to the right !!

but as you sead I guess it's good enuff for now .

VINNY

[marqueemark]

Re: External Drive Partitions

The option to delete was not available, aka it was in light grey letter, when selecting the extended partition

[oshunluvr]

Re: External Drive Partitions

Well, not to be Captain Obvious, but that screen-shot shows the partitions are mounted. You can't delete a mounted partition.

Personally, I would: Open up a terminal, delete the offending partitions manually with fdisk, run part-probe, re-launch partition manager, expand your remaining partition to full size, done.

[marqueemark]

Re: External Drive Partitions

Please be even more obvious. That drive I had the pics from is done for now, I could use help with my other one. It is a 2 terabyte, and I am looking to do the same thing, make it just one continuous drive. I am going to attach pics below, but as for what you were saying about the drives being mounted, the ones on this drive are not, or at least the option to unmount is not there. I am a little hesitant to use the terminal to do this as I not entirely comfortable using it yet. As you can see in this case there are 5 partitions I need to get rid of, although two are only 128 megs each so they can stay if its a real pain to get rid them. When I right click on any of the partitions the only available option is "properties" except on ext 4 where i can copy and the linuxswap where I can activate swap.

[oshunluvr]

Re: External Drive Partitions

Well, the two 128MB partitions indicate that this drive has been formatted with a GUID Partition Table and likely supports EFI booting. I don't think you can safely remove these without endangering your ability to access the drive. I'm not very knowledgeable about GPT/EFI enabled drive so I'll forgo any advice in that area.

You'll notice the drive table does not include an Extended partition as this newer partitioning scheme removes the Primary partition limit as well as the 2.19TB bios hard drive limit.

You should still be able to delete the unwanted partitions though. I wonder if the current version of KDE Partition Manager supports GPT yet. Try installing Gparted and then using it to remove the unwanted partitions.

[vinnywright]

Re: External Drive Partitions

I wonder if the current version of KDE Partition Manager supports GPT yet. Try installing Gparted and then using it to remove the unwanted partitions.

parted dose I think.

so Gparted should be good with it.

VINNY

[marqueemark]

Re: External Drive Partitions

I installed gparted but it won't accept my password. I tried both the system password and the kdewallet one many times and the program won't let me in

[kubicle]

Re: External Drive Partitions

I wonder if the current version of KDE Partition Manager supports GPT yet.

Version 1.1 should, previous versions don't.

I installed gparted but it won't accept my password.

Start gparted with "kdesudo gparted" (to gain admin privileges), and enter your password in the kdesudo dialog...it should work around the issue.

[marqueemark]

Re: External Drive Partitions


This worked, I got into the program. I have taken 2 more snapshots, the first is the drive as it shows currently, then the next i have selected to delete two of the partitions leaving the 3 with the little warning signs on them. So far is this correct? will I be able to resize the main partition to use up the empty space after I press apply. I don't want to take any step that might damage something without confirmation I am doing the right thing

[oshunluvr]

Re: External Drive Partitions

Yes, that looks OK except you should delete partition 4 also. Then you'll have one large empty space to grow your partition into.