Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1092448
Accepted
Ryan Budney
Asked: 2018-11-13 22:37:40 +0800 CST

gparted, fdisk and gnome-disks stuck (in various ways)

  • 772

I've been having trouble getting gparted to run. I'd like to format a usb stick. . . but when I attempt to load gparted it endlessly cycles through "scanning all devices". This is a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install on a Dell Latitude 5290, in case that helps.

Gparted does the same regardless of the usb stick being inserted or not.

When I run gparted from "sudo gparted" the output is:

Unit -.mount does not exist, proceeding anyway
Gtk-Message: 12:31:43.801: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
==============
libparted: 3.2
==============

The GUI comes up with the scanning animation on the bottom bar. And that's all that happens.

edit:

I should add, this is not just a gparted problem. When I run "sudo fdisk -l", fdisk starts listing my drives, but when it gets to /dev/sdc it freezes. Even a ^c won't get me out of fdisk. "sudo killall fdisk" does not kill the fdisk task.

The "Disks" GUI application often does not load. Attempting to run it from the command line results in the error message "GNOME-Disks-ERROR **: Error getting udisks client: Timeout was reached Trace/breakpoint trap"

When I use the gnome-disks utility to format the usb drive it gives me:

Error creating file system: Command-line `parted --script "/dev/sdd" mktable msdos' exited with non-zero exit status 1: Error: Input/output error during read on /dev/sdd
Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/sdd
 (udisks-error-quark, 0)

edit 2: I managed to get gparted to load with the usb drive inserted on one of my old LUbuntu 16.04 boxes. gparted spews out a lot of warnings. The "information" panel for /dev/sdd (it calls it sdd now) says:

/dev/sdd: unrecognised disk label
Input/output error during read on /dev/sdd
usb gparted fdisk 18.04 gnome-disk-utility

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It is possible that there is a hardware problem with one of the hard disk drives. If this is the case, then you can run the dmesg command in a terminal and scan the output for errors related to the hard disk drives.

    Another way to see if the problem is drive specific is to pass a known good hard drive to GParted. For example:

    sudo gparted /dev/sda

    That way only the /dev/sda hard drive will be scanned.

    If the sudo fdisk -l command also hangs, then that lends more credence to the idea that there may be a hardware problem with one of the hard disk drives.

    • 1