USB drive preventing boot up

Corncrake2

fwor wrote: »

Have you tried booting from that GPARTED LiveCD yet?

Errrm, how can I put this ,,,
No not yet, I'm a coward !
With something that powerful and my tendency to push wrong buttons I have it in reserve but thanks for the pointer I will play with it later. First I need to back up that drive. Messing with boot sectors is not to be undertaken sober, errr I mean

I really need to understand what/where the problem is, as in read only, first before jumping in the deep end
also :
I dont know where I put my CDs ! (long not used, big HDs have become much more useful) so I looked at the liveUSB version and got frightened by all the warnings ! Now I am studying Tuxboot.

Thanks for your thoughts/help

PS It has been interesting for another reason : I discover I have four partitions on my C: two look empty, one has the bootable OS and another has a "Windows Recovery Hidden Partition" which may be handy sometime since this second hand laptop came without a recovery disk, , , so much to learn, so little time ,,,

fwor

Probably wise to be cautious. Though Linux-based LiveCD/USB distributions tend to be very safe - they all create a disk-like filesystem in RAM and so have no reason to mess with your disks at all, unless you tell them to.

Corncrake2 wrote: »

PS It has been interesting for another reason : I discover I have four partitions on my C: two look empty, one has the bootable OS and another has a "Windows Recovery Hidden Partition" which may be handy sometime since this second hand laptop came without a recovery disk, , , so much to learn, so little time ,,,

Seems to be quite common these days - the unused HDD (replaced immediately with an SSD) out of my recently-bought HP laptop has 4 partitions - a small bootable one for a bootloader, another for Recovery, a tiny FAT-32 formatted one with HP Tools on it and the main Windows partition.

robmar0se

I haven't read all the dialogue, but one thing that may be causing this is that the drive may have a hidden partition. I know that some WD passport drives have this (and they are powered from the USB socket) - I once tried to get rid of it, the hidden partition, but failed abysmally.

So is this a proprietary external hdd, if so what is it?

Corncrake2

robmar0se wrote: »

I haven't read all the dialogue, but one thing that may be causing this is that the drive may have a hidden partition. I know that some WD passport drives have this (and they are powered from the USB socket) - I once tried to get rid of it, the hidden partition, but failed abysmally.

So is this a proprietary external hdd, if so what is it?

Ah! very interesting, you may have hit a nail there, yes it is a WD ! (I dont recognise passport but ) cant find the packaging, few years old, for a correct description but on the back it has WD1600E1MS-00 so I think it is one of these
http://support.wdc.com/product/install.asp?groupid=302&lang=en

in particular the 160GB model ( although the capacity doesnt ring a bell !)

Forgive speelin mistooks, I took to the bottle after earlier posts this evening, will take up the battle on the morrow
Thanks everyone ,,,,

robmar0se

Corncrake2 wrote: »

Ah! very interesting, you may have hit a nail there, yes it is a WD ! (I dont recognise passport but ) cant find the packaging, few years old, for a correct description but on the back it has WD1600E1MS-00 so I think it is one of these

I don't think the wd hidden partition is model dependent - try this, although it didn't work on the model I tried it on.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/passport-vcd.html

Corncrake2

VERY interesting, not sober enough to read and appreciate all that link tonight but
first reaction is to back up all my files (it is only a data disk) and do a low level fdisk
but I suppose you tried that and found it wanting ?

PS Edit : ah I see dedoimedo has already addressed fdisk
time I went to bed !