Plasma Partition Manager issue?

WetGeek

I'd removed some NVMe drives from laptops that have failed over time, and were being recycled. One of those is a 256GB drive, so I wanted to use it for something else, and I bought an SSK external eclosure for it. Great little aluminum housing, by the way, and total tool-free assembly with a heat-sink included ... highly recommended.

Anyway, I wanted to partition and format that drive in preparation for making it useful, so I launched the KDE partition manager, and that's where my latest adventure started.

The tool launched, and immediately started searching for devices to operate on. It should have found the 500GB internal SSD and the 256GB external drive (Dolphin sees both), but instead it stopped with the progress bar indicating 0% read. After a long pause, I could only proceed by logging out and starting over again.

Trying again, the same thing happened. I thought it might have something to do with the external drive and its enclosure's electronics, so I unplugged it and logged back in. The partition manager did exactly the same. I was really surprised, because Dolphin had no problem reading from both drives, so they were obviously both mounted and working well.

I have other machines I can use to clean up this NVMe, but this all has me wondering whether this is yet another Plasma fault. Has anyone else using Plasma found the partition manager unable to read the mounted storage devices?

WetGeek

WetGeek Has anyone else using Plasma found the partition manager unable to read the mounted storage devices?

NOTE: it shouldn't be necessary to have an external drive connected to check this. The partition manager does the same thing on my laptop with the external drive unplugged, as I mentioned. It locks up even just looking for the internal drive.

murbert

WetGeek but this all has me wondering whether this is yet another Plasma fault.

I'll just take this opportunity to point out that Budgie does not have this problem. Gparted works fine. 🤣

Staudey

I don't know how it works with the Plasma desktop, but when I launch the utility on Budgie it presents me with a password input box at the start. After entering my password it successfully lists my disks/partitions. Do you also get that password dialogue after launch?

WetGeek

Staudey Do you also get that password dialogue after launch?

No, and that surprised me. Seems like it would need elevated permissions to change anything there, but possibly it allows ordinary users to read only? In any case, it went straight to looking for devices.

That's probably a really valuable debugging clue.

Girtablulu

You need to lunch it with Sudo, I suspect our older polkit version causes some issues, which @DataDrake needs to have a look at reg updating due our special C patches we have with it

WetGeek

Girtablulu You need to lunch it with Sudo

Thanks (to both of you)! I thought of lauching it from a terminal, but I don't know the name of the executable. Obviously, it's not "KDE Partition Manager," and eopkg info was no help. Do you remember what it's called?

Or is there a way to elevate the permissions somehow with sudo in Dolphin that I don't know about?

CorvusRuber

WetGeek Thanks (to both of you)! I thought of lauching it from a terminal, but I don't know the name of the executable. Obviously, it's not "KDE Partition Manager," and eopkg info was no help. Do you remember what it's called?

It's partitionmanager, simple as that. By the way, both via terminal and from krunner it asks for the root/sudo password.......BUT sometimes the popup that asks for it starts minimized instead of in the foreground, so it could be missed.

WetGeek

CorvusRuber It's partitionmanager, simple as that.

Imagine something so straight-forward! Indeed, that worked just fine.

Thanks again to everyone for your help with this. Once again the Solus Forum has come through with a win.