# Unable to seek on /dev/sdd

## FireDemonSiC

Last night, I attempted to re-structure my linux partitions from an Ubuntu LiveCD for a clean install using gparted with the kpartx package installed so I could properly see the partitions on my RAID 0 array.

I deleted everything except for my two NTFS partitions and attempted to recreate the primary boot partition and the extended partition that would contain the other 3 logical linux partitions. When it got to one of the logical partitions, it failed. Goping back, gparted now shows that I have my two NTFS partitions for a total of 1TB, my extended partition also 1TB and another 1TB of free space after that. This is 1TB MORE of drive space than I actually have and the entire parition layout looks jacked up.

I closed gparted and when I attempted to open it back up it would not open. It gave an error and aborted.

Fed up with all the various difficulties I was having with Ubuntu I decided to go with Gentoo again. I booted the LiveCD (Minimal install), used ifconfig and net-setup to obtain an address then attempted to use fdisk to investigate what was up with my partition layout, and that's when I discovered the problem.

Viewing the hard drives individually, they should all read as 500.1GB with no partition table. /dev/sda, sdb and sbc all show this correctly. However, sdd is actually split into sdd1 and sdd2 so it appears that the 4th hard drive has a partition table that should not exist. When I attmpt to use fdisk /dev/sdd to delete the table, it returns with the error message unable to seek on /dev/sdd.

From within a GUI based LiveCD I can still mount and access all the files of my two NTFS partitions so it appears the RAID array and all the data within it is still intact.

How do I go about correcting this? Thanks in advance.

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## Hu

What do you want to do to correct it?  Are you just trying to zap the partition table on sdd?  If yes, and if it is using an MS-DOS MBR style partition table, as opposed to a GPT style table, then you can just overwrite the first 512 bytes with 0 to smash the partition table, then use sfdisk -R /dev/sdd to reread it.  This will lose any data you have on sdd!  To overwrite the first 512 bytes, run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd count=1 bs=512.

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