I hate Gparted

I never thought I'd despise an application/program as much as Network Manager but a new candidate has arrived.

I don't even know where to ask this question. It's not really relevant to a notebook I own but I might need to use Gparted if I get a Thinkpad (or Centrino/Pentium M) or newer notebook.

I have a 20GB IDE HDD in an old Pentium 3 and wanted to try out different distributions. But, GParted from any distro shows up as 'device not detected' and doesn't "see" my partitions. I first installed Windows. I formatted the drive first and created a partition for Windows, then installed it. I think it must be a bad thing when ONE application becomes a standard (GParted seems to take over for a lot of distros). SystemRecoveryCD's GParted did the same thing. Any distro's livecd with GParted gives the same result. I googled and can't find a solution. Windows installed fine so it's not about defective hardware. I could only think it's something to do with drivers or totally Linux-related. I have had distro installs go fine in a newer desktop. I wanted to use the older computer to experiment and become more familiar with installs and partition management.

Any ideas?

 

It doesn't sound like GParted is the problem. What's with your hate? I'm thinking your Linux distros just don't have the driver for your HD compiled to the kernel. Maybe.

 

How are you running gparted? Have you looked at fdisk? Are you trying to make a dual-boot system or something? Because if you aren't, you have no need to use gparted and try to preserve anything. Just use "fdisk /dev/hda" and then create your partitions. Or can you just run the installer, see what happens? What happens if you do fdisk /dev/hda? hdb? sda?

 

fdisk /dev/hda => unable to open /dev/hda

 

I still can't figure it out even though I've googled. My only guesses so far is that it has to do with 'mounting' and/or not recognizing the IDE hardware due to newer/more recent kernel in the distro. Other than that, I have no idea. :-(

 

So buy a copy of Partition Magic.
If that doesn't work you can start a new thread; "I Hate Partition Magic"

 

If you issue fdisk -l what do you get back?
(That is a lower case L)

 

I don't know about hating gparted, but I do find that for any serious partition dinking I need to boot in XP and use Partition Magic. It seems like gparted really wants you to know about where on partition end and the other begins and partition order. With PM, you just say, "shrink this partition by 10 Gb, then reallocate the free space to a second partition." I also seem to hit cases where gparted refuses to work on a partition. This kind of thing makes me a bit jumpy anyway, so I go with PM.

-John

 

Try Parted Magic free live CD. Sometimes you need to use an older version on older hardware. Parted Magic was working very well on me even when Ubuntu partitioner (gparted) was not able to proceed.

 

Is there any chance that it could be that the newer (or more recent) kernel distro is not supporting IDE (ATA) or a certain IDE drive? I discovered that an older distro with kernel 2.6.19 was able to utilize the Live CD's GParted (this was done in Knoppix).

I am going to try another LiveCD of an older kernel/distro to confirm this theory. If it is correct or even related, I don't know why this is a mystery. I've googled but haven't found any mention of it yet. I cannot find any other answer and have no other idea to explain it.

The computer is a Pentium III, Compaq Deskpro EN SFF with Intel Corporation 82815 815 Chipset (or possibly 810... I could check if needed). The HDD is a 20GB drive.

 

GParted has always worked great for me.

 

Well the new versions absolutely do still support IDE, but trying a different version usually is the right place to start. Most threads I've read on the net about trouble with GParted ended with, "used an older version - worked".

Don't be so harsh on GParted. Keep in mind it isn't released from a billion dollar corporation that can afford to hire thousands of programmers. Instead it is just a coalition of geeks trying to make it work, and giving that work to you for free.

 

Pentium 3? I believe I take that for a walk out to the curb. Try Parted Magic. It's at download.com