Got it sorted! I used UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) and it's copy of Gparted
to attempt a recover of the disc, which showed me that it had been a
Windows system. I was then able to format the whole disk as NTFS.
For some reason it had not wanted to know Ubuntu, but now I was able to
install Fedora 27 (KDE) which is up and running. Yesterday once I got
it into a state where the head was continuously seeking back and forth
(You know that sound when you hear it).
This morning I was unable to run fsck on it because of something to do
with LVM, but UBCD has a disk test facility that I have run. Yes there
are some faults on the disk, and some parts that are 'pre-failure', but
it shows that it has had 19000 hours of use.
Conclusion: Success, and the disk will be OK for play, but don't be
surprised if it continues to degrade.
Cheers,
Peter
On 05/04/18 19:41, Hamish MB wrote:
Sounds perplexing...
You could try gparted's create partition table option (in one of the menus).
Beyond that, maybe it's better to give up if its being that much of a
pain - it may just be broken.
Hamish
On 05/04/18 17:46, PeterMerchant via dorset wrote:
I was given an old Dell with a 250GB MAxtor SATA disk that couldn't be
found by the live disks that I tried. Eventually I loaded up a rescue
disk and gparted and discovered that the disk had an invalid
partition. I was unable to format it as Ext2, 3 or 4, But I did format
it as 2 FAT32 partitions and then it was recognised in my other
computer. I have tried again to get it to format as Ext-x with no
luck. It now does have a swap partition. It didn't like having the
jumper in for the CLJ (cylinder Limitation jumper)
Any thoughts on how I can possibly resurrect this disk, or should I
not waste my time?
Thanks,
Peter
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