I've been trying to modify the partition table of a SATA drive. I tried GParted and it failed to make any changes. I was able to backup the (NTFS) partition using G4L and FTP.

However, when I tried to restore it, I got the same kind of timeouts and failures as with GParted. Any ideas on why this is? Why would it fail to write to the partition and why can't GParted modify the partition table? By the way, I was trying to restore to a formatted NTFS partition that was larger than the original backup, but otherwise the same.

Thanks. I'll give it a go. But I already know the state of the table.

It's only linux that seems to fail on this drive. I mean, Windows is able to write to it and change the partition table. So is 'Super FDisk'.

I'm trying G4L in 'raw' mode, so the format should be irrelevant. I think maybe there is some problem in the SATA driver in Linux that isn't allowing it to modify the drive.

There is some error like this:
ata0.exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen