Corrupted ntfs prevents partitioning

[night_fox]

Hi, I have used Ubuntu for ages on my laptop and I am trying to install it on a fairly old PC at home for my family to use. I can boot Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex from the live cd. The live cd won't resize my partition, and the gparted Partition Editor wont either. Instead it tells me to run


ntfsclone --rescue

then to go to windows and use


chkdsk /f /r c:

Then to go to back to Ubuntu and do


ntfsresize --bad-sectors

before creating the partitions for Ubuntu.

The ntfs partition size is 80 gigabytes. I did the first one and started cloning the filesystem to my external hard drive. I left it for 6 hours and it had done 12%, so it might have taken 50 hours to complete the whole thing. My mum thinks that a computer left on overnight is a fire hazard, also, that sort of time is impractical. Is there a better way of doing it?

Also, does ext3 look for and work around bad sectors when it gets installed?

[night_fox]

bump. Please can I have some advice?

[Mark Phelps]

I'm probably going to get flamed big-time for saying this, because I've dared to criticize an Linux utility (GParted), but it's been MY experience that it doesn't handle NTFS partitions well. Windows-based partition managers (not surpisingly) do a lot better job of handling NTFS partitions -- but you have to pay for those.

What MIGHT work is the following:
1) Boot from a current (8.10) live cd
2) Open Synaptec and see if ntfs-3g is installed (I'm guessing it is), If not, install it
3) Check if ntfs-config is installed (probably not), and install it
4) Run ntfs-config from the Applications menu
5) Select the NTFS partition and allow it write access
6) Open GParted (if not in the System --> Administration menu, you'll have to install it in Synaptec)
7) See if it will NOW allow you to mess with the NTFS partition.
8) If it does, you're OK; if it doesn't, don't know what else to do apart from getting a Windows-based paritioning tool.

[clw3388]

If box is old and you are installing linux.. why resize the ntfs? Kill it by letting the install format it..

[night_fox]

Thankyou Mark. I will certainly try that. I'll post here again when I have!

I will never pay for a partition editor, so if it doesn't work, the only thing to do would be ve......ry long. Supposing my HD is covered in bad sectors, why could I not just recursively copy all the data onto another HD formatted to ntfs?

[night_fox]

OK, I tried that and it didn't work. However, I copied each and every file on the ntfs partition to my external hard drive and it took 2 hours.

I dont know what could be wrong with doing this. I got every file, and to prove it,:

ls -Rl /media/disk >> lsdisk
ls -Rl /media/FreeAgent\ Drive/backup >> lsbackup
diff lsdisk lsbackup
no output so every file must be backed up.

To resize the internal ntfs:

ntfsresize --bad-sectors -s 55G /dev/sda2

I copied the output of several partition manipulators and used dd to make a backup of the mbr and then used cfdisk to change the partition table.

Then I installed Ubuntu

Ubuntu is awesome, but I dunno how any non-geek would be able to install Ubuntu if they had to do that.