Possible bug

[Jon Rutherford]

I received this message attempting to partition and format a 
new Seagate 160GB hard drive on my desktop computer which 
has a Microstar Model MS6309 motherboard (also known as 
AL6309MS).  I had apparently successfuly done the work using 
Knoppix live CD, as I'd been unable in my Ubuntu 6.06 
(Dapper) installation using cfdisk--although it reported 
success several times, and though mke2fs -j had apparently 
worked, too--though it also failed several times.

Then at the end of the qtparted operation under Knoppix, I 
got an error message in red that there had been a failure in 
mkef3 (is that right? anyway similar to mke2fs).  Rebooting 
my normal Dapper install, disk was not recognized.  I 
attempted once more to partition and format using qtparted, 
this time from within the framework of the Dapper system, 
and received this message:

address@hidden:~# qtparted &
[1] 5533
address@hidden:~# X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized 
input device 168
  Major opcode:  145
  Minor opcode:  3
  Resource id:  0x0
Failed to open device
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 168
  Major opcode:  145
  Minor opcode:  3
  Resource id:  0x0
Failed to open device
Error: Unable to open /dev/hdb - unrecognised disk label.
A bug has been detected in GNU Parted.  Refer to the web 
site of parted 
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html for more 
informations of what could be useful for bug submitting! 
Please email a bug report to address@hidden containing 
at least the version (1.6.25.1) and the following message: 
Assertion (disk != NULL) at ../../libparted/disk.c:1074 in 
function ped_disk_next_partition() failed.


I am doubtful about any bug in qtparted, rather thinking it 
may be either a cable problem or something in the kernel(s) 
that is not wanting to work with this disk.

I hope I've supplied some useful information in case you 
think there might be a bug after all.

It seemed odd to me that cfdisk would sometimes not even see 
the drive, sometimes treat it perfectly normally, and ditto 
mke2fs.

Once and once only I was able to partition using cfdisk 
under Knoppex and mke2fs -j under Knoppix, and mount and 
write a test file to the drive, which was recognized by ls.

The other times it was one failure after another.  I've 
never had trouble installing any hard drive before.

Thanks for your attention--

Jon Rutherford
Kansas City, Missouri