On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 12:00 +0100, Colin Law <[email protected]> wrote: > On 19 May 2010 11:38, Rowan Berkeley <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On the Gparted display, all the volumes -- not just on the external > > hard drive, but on the laptop's own drives -- are marked with little > > keyrings. The menus for doing anything to any of them, such as > > resizing etc., are greyed out. What do I need to do gain access to > > them? Thanks, Rowan > Right click the partition (in gparted) and select Unmount. Don't > unmount a partition you are using, obviously. Colin
When I do that, it gives me a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. Looking at 'information' at that point, it says "Unable to read the contents of this file system! Because of this, some operations may be unavailable." And 'resize' is still greyed out. Incidentally, properties for the whole hard disk says "permissions for this volume could not be determined." Perhaps I need to be logged in as root to do anything to it, something I do not know how to achieve, since Linux Emporium never told me, though I could ask them. The usual advice when you ask this is, "Why not just use sudo?" I think my best bet might be to copy everything on the external hard drive into onboard memory, since in fact this laptop does seem to have 200GB or so of free memory, then wipe the external hard drive completely and reformat it. I do not know how exactly to copy such a vast mass of data (scores of folders, total 125GB) to an onboard location, since I don't know how to specify the location I want anything copied to. But ideally, I should do that, then reformat the hard drive and copy everything back onto it, and keep both sets rather than wiping either, so that the hard drive becomes my backup in case anything happens to the laptop. Does that sound easier? Thanks in advance to all who advise on this. -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
