Logical Block Size of 4096 on Samsung Mini S1 causes gparted to fail

[bolucpap]

Hello, I just bought a Samsung S1 Mini External drive (120gb) with hopes to transfer the Ubuntu (which I boot from, using a number of work and home computers) and NTFS Data partitions from my Maxtor Basics Portable since the S1 Mini is much easier to carry around. When I connect the drive, Ubuntu sees and mounts it fine, but in order to boot from it I try to use GParted to set up the partitions to resemble the ones on my Maxtor; and that's where the trouble starts. First of all, the graphical map shows the disk as having one Unknown Partition of size 13.97 GB (which is EXACTLY 1/8 of its actual capacity). So I ran gksu gparted to see if it was throwing up any errors, and sure enough :

Device /dev/sde has a logical sector size of 4096.  Not all parts of GNU Parted support this at the moment, and the working code is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL.

fdisk -l has the following output for the relevant drive:

Note: sector size is 4096 (not 512)

Disk /dev/sde: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1824 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 4096 = 65802240 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000001

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde1               1        1824   117209988    7  HPFS/NTFS

It seems to me that I will not be able to boot Ubuntu from this drive until I get the logical volume size to 512 somehow, or until parted starts supporting this size (tried karmic alpha 4, it doesnt - yet)

Any thoughts? Any tools to convert? Any help would be much much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Boluc Papuccuoglu

[bolucpap]

bump?

[jomeier]

Hi,

I have the same usb hard drive and the same problem. Does anybody have a solution?

Regards,

Josef

[lokster]

I just bought the same disk - S1 Mini 120GB and have the same problem.
The Ubuntu installer does not detect the drive correctly, gparted, cfdisk, fdisk, parted... nothing works.
The disk can be mounted and used, once formatted under Windows, but I can't install Ubuntu on it.

I bought it to disassemble and mount it inside my Acer Aspire One (a little mod), but it looks like this will not happen soon...

Is there a way to actually change the disk geometry, or fool Ubuntu about it?

[triplefox]

I am also having this problem with the S1. I wanted to use it for a portable install with my EEE 900. cfdisk reported the correct 120GB size and wrote new partition data without complaint, but gparted says it is 16GB, and it will not mount.

[ApolloDS]

Hi all

Exactly same problem here with the S1 mini 250GB version

[reedzsu]

The same as me.

I formated and partitioned the samsung s1 mini 120G by using windows xp.
Then under lubuntu 10.04 beta1, I use the disk ultility to format the main partition to ext4.
Then I ran the installer.
But the bootloader cannot be intalled, and the MBR cannot be writted.

How could I do?