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[OCLUG-Tech] Help recovering a (software-dead, not hardware dead) hard-drive

  • Subject: [OCLUG-Tech] Help recovering a (software-dead, not hardware dead) hard-drive
  • From: ed stuckems <edstuckems [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com>
  • Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:21:47 -0500
Hello folks:

I need to resize an ntfs partition to make room for a linux distro.
Since I've never resized an ntfs partition before, I dug up a spare
drive I had laying around with the intent to format it to include an
ntfs partition that I can later resize.  In fact, the plan was to
format the drive to have a similar layout to the drive that I
eventually want to target.  Alas, in trying to create the layout on
the second drive I seem to have F@&%ed it up to the point that it's no
longer recognized by the OS.  Is there anyone that can suggest a
course of action to revive the drive?

My test drive is a 1T drive that's connected to the computer via usb
and I'm trying to format the drive so that it'll boot in a (u)efi
machine.  The last thing I did with the drive was to try and create
one large partition formatted with a fat32 filesystem.  When I last
used the machine and drive, I was still able to mount, umount, and
access the drive with parted but when I turned off the machine and
rebooted, the device wouldn't attach to a device file in /dev thus
preventing me from either mounting the drive or using parted/fdisk to
repartition it.  If I were to ask a specific question it would be "How
to I coerce linux into connecting the drive to a device (in /dev) so
that I can run something like fdisk or parted on the device be able to
create a filesystem with mkfs"?

thanks,
eds