unetbootin doesn't see the fat32 partition on my external hd

[AgelessDrifter]

[158460.160083] wlan0: authenticate with 00:18:6e:5f:56:00 (try 1)
[158460.164411] wlan0: authenticated
[158460.176337] wlan0: associate with 00:18:6e:5f:56:00 (try 1)
[158460.204934] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from 00:18:6e:5f:56:00 (capab=0x421 status=0 aid=2)
[158460.204944] wlan0: associated
[158579.699982] wlan0: authenticate with 00:14:7c:8f:a4:40 (try 1)
[158579.705749] wlan0: authenticated
[158579.720518] wlan0: associate with 00:14:7c:8f:a4:40 (try 1)
[158579.727241] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from 00:14:7c:8f:a4:40 (capab=0x421 status=0 aid=1)
[158579.727251] wlan0: associated

I don't think it's a gpt partition table. The whole drive was NTFS when I started, and I've since wiped the whole drive and put on an NTFS partition and a very small FAT32 partition using gparted.

[oldfred]

I have had gparted not show my entire sda drive when XP in sda still booted. I then ran chkdsk and gparted showed it and XP booted a tad faster (4 min instead of 5).

I have a bios_grub partition (gpt drive) that does not show in blkid, but another drive's bios_grub does show. In gparted the one without the UUID has a gparted partition error flag (unknown).

So I might try chkdsk on both the FAT and the NTFS partitions from a Windows repairCD or Windows install.

[dragonfly41]

does testdisk (running as root) see your USB drive?

[WasMeHere]

Hi,

This is just a wild guess: What Unetbootin version are you running and from what operating system? Remember that Windows only can see the first partition in a USB drive!

If you install Unetbootin into Ubuntu, it can see and use any of the primary partitions. I often use the second one for the live system, so that the first partition can be used from Linux and Windows to read and write data.

sudo apt-get install unetbootin

Have fun finding out
Olle

[AgelessDrifter]

testdisk sees the drive and both partitions. It says the FAT32 partition is primary bootable, which is odd because I made it bootable, but disk utility threw me an error, so I wiped the whole drive and replaced the partitions, but I never went back and made the fat32 partition bootable again.

[WasMeHere]

I think you need to test various methods and theories of what can be causing your problem, but I really have no idea of what it can be.

Have you tried to access your USB drive from another computer and/or another operating system? Or have you tested your USB ports with another USB drive (HDD or flash drive)?

Do you have any data on your USB drive, that you need to save? If this is the case, I think you should back it up now, or try to recover it.

Then I suggest that you try to repartition the drive from the beginning with gparted. And you must boot your system from another drive in order to do it properly. If this does not work, there is something wrong with the connection or the drive itself.

[AgelessDrifter]

The drive is external, and everything I've been trying has been through ubuntu booting from my laptop's internal hard drive. There is no data on the external -- the most recent thing I tried was to wipe it and repartition it (through ubuntu booted from my internal drive) with gparted, but the outputs I've posted in this thread have all come after that, so that didn't fix it.

The drive was working in Windows 7 before I started trying to get gparted-live on there, but I haven't tried it since. I'll try again now and report the results. The drive has been mountable and has had data on and off it through ubuntu -- at one point it was showing up in both lspci and blkid, so I don't think it's the connection to the drive.

[idoitprone]

[158460.160083] wlan0: authenticate with 00:18:6e:5f:56:00 (try 1)
[158460.164411] wlan0: authenticated
[158460.176337] wlan0: associate with 00:18:6e:5f:56:00 (try 1)
[158460.204934] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from 00:18:6e:5f:56:00 (capab=0x421 status=0 aid=2)
[158460.204944] wlan0: associated
[158579.699982] wlan0: authenticate with 00:14:7c:8f:a4:40 (try 1)
[158579.705749] wlan0: authenticated
[158579.720518] wlan0: associate with 00:14:7c:8f:a4:40 (try 1)
[158579.727241] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from 00:14:7c:8f:a4:40 (capab=0x421 status=0 aid=1)
[158579.727251] wlan0: associated

I don't think it's a gpt partition table. The whole drive was NTFS when I started, and I've since wiped the whole drive and put on an NTFS partition and a very small FAT32 partition using gparted.

partition table and filesystem is not the same. Partition tabel manages the filesystem. NTFS and fat is a file system while mbr and gpt is a partition table

to check, you have install some utilities

sudo apt-get install gdisk

to check post output of

sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb

gparted is gpt aware but i am not so sure about unetbootin
Wiping your flash drive does not mean you wipe the partition table. You have to explictly change it

[AgelessDrifter]

Here's the output of that command, idoit.

Partition table scan:
  MBR: MBR only
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: not present


***************************************************************
Found invalid GPT and valid MBR; converting MBR to GPT format.
***************************************************************

Disk /dev/sdb: 976773167 sectors, 465.8 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): F6B73A21-23A3-4C0E-BF70-A168B6BFD7ED
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773133
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2028 sectors (1014.0 KiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048          514047   250.0 MiB   0700  Linux/Windows data
   2          514048       976773119   465.5 GiB   0700  Linux/Windows data

"found invalid GPT and valid MBR makes me nervous. Any ideas what that's about?


I tried the drive on Windows 7. Windows found it. I tried installing gparted live on the drive through tuxboot on Windows, and that went off without a hitch, but when I rebooted, the Toshiba screen with "press F12 for boot menu" froze before I pressed anything.

I wiped the drive with gparted on linux, then reinstalled gparted live with tuxboot through windows again. Same result -- boot screen freezes immediately if the drive is plugged in.

[oldfred]

If drive was gpt and you install Windows it converts back to MBR but only overwrite the primary gpt partition table. One of the advantages of gpt is that it has a backup to the partition table and Windows does not erase the backup. Linux tools see the backup and get confused if MBR or gpt.

Fixparts - Repair broken partition tables (not overlapping issues) & delete Stray gpt data from MBR drives
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1705325
http://www.rodsbooks.com/fixparts/
First backup partiton table, use your drive for sdX or sda, sdb etc.
sudo sfdisk -d /dev/sdX > parts.txt