Chromium OS partitions won't appear on GParted

Question

I dual boot Chromium OS with Windows 7 on an Asus U36 PC. To do this I simply installed a Chromium OS build from chromeos.hexxeh.net into a USB, then I copied C-STATE and C-ROOT to my hard drive, using unix dd command.

Now I want to upgrade my Chromium OS, so I followed the same steps, installed a fresh copy of the OS to a USB. It boots pretty nice from the USB disk itself. But when I inspect the USB disk using gparted -to find the C-STATE and C-ROOT partitions- it shows all the space in my USB disk as 'unallocated'. So I have nothing to copy to my hard drive!

Apparently Chromium team changed something. Anybody knows what is it they changed --well actually, my real question is: how should I proceed?

Answer 1

I used gdisk. gdisk -l showed the partitions -start/end sectors etc- correctly. Then I used dd to extract STATE and ROOT-A partitions. Note that root partition is almost 3/2 times its older size.

Exact commands for 12/02 Vanilla image -which probably wont change for a while- are:

gdisk -l ChromeOS-Vanilla-3332.0.2012_12_02_1623-r33776c1c-1.img
dd if=ChromeOS-Vanilla-3332.0.2012_12_02_1623-r33776c1c.img of=root.img skip=2379777 count=2539520 
dd if=ChromeOS-Vanilla-3332.0.2012_12_02_1623-r33776c1c.img of=state.img skip=282624 count=2097152

Answer 2

I was dealing with this problem a bit earlier...

GParted won't read my version of Chrome OS either...but don't worry! There is a tool for Windows called MiniTool Partition Editor, or something along those lines, that will read and copy the partitions. For the record, Chrome OS partitions are GPT. Also "C-ROOT" and "C-STATE" have been renamed to "ROOT-A" and "STATE". This is due to a change in the way that Chrome OS builds are built and the fact that GParted just can't read them.