Ubuntu Installation :: Installer Won't Advance To Partition Table?
Dec 20, 2010
This is maybe the 15th time I've installed an Ubuntu OS in the past two years, and it's the first time I've really been stuck.Not long ago I installed 10.10, with no problems, but a couple days ago I did a fresh install of windows 7, and I planned to re-install ubuntu 10.10 alongside it.Before I installed windows, I created a partition on my 320gb HD, half and half, but while doing this I noticed that gparted would crash if a USB key was plugged in. I mention this because I'm convinced this is related to the problem.
After having installed windows, I went and created a bootable usb key with 10.10 using unetbootin (which I've used once before, but along time ago). I'm unable to make an actual live CD because my disk drive has been broken for the past year - a fact that has never stopped me from installing different distros with a usb key.So the installer starts as usual, but after the 2nd (or 3rd) step (where it says "for best results, make sure that your computer is plugged in, that you have an internet connection, and at least [...] of free space), I click forward, and the little wheel just spins forever,it never advances.I tried everything again with 10.04.1 and I got the same thing, this time after choosing my keyboard layout.
When I simply go to the live distro and then go to install, I see that at that moment, there's a crash report, something about gparted, which I'm assuming is a built-in part of the next step.
To sum up
-gparted doesn't seem to like USB keys
-installer won't advance to partition table
-can't use a disk because drive is broken!
My computer is an Acer Aspire 4530, AMD64. The 10.10 and the 10.04.1 installations were both 64bit.
So I decided to reinstall my 10.10 to undo the 'encrypted home folder feature.' I know are other ways to undo the encryption, but for various reasons I'd rather just do a quick reinstall and start fresh.Currently, I dual boot linux and windows, each with their respective partitions. There is also a storage partition that is fat32 to swap files between the two OSes. So the partitions are:
I think I found a bug with the maverick installer. [URL]. The installer is incorrectly reading my partition table I'm afraid it might overwrite data. /dev/sda3 is the target for the install.
/dev/sda1 = 200M = Windows system partition /dev/sda2 = 239G = Windows install /dev/sda3 = 50G = Where I want to install Linux /dev/sda4 = 45G = NTFS storage
At first I had /dev/sda3 as a RAW type. In fact the only way I could create ext4 is via mkfs. I did unmount them before proceeding - mounted just as a reference in the screenshot. fdisk reads the same thing. Fresh install from LiveCD. I only have Wipe entire disk or Advanced in the installer. I don't have the "Install along side another OS" option.
it will have a 1TB HDD with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I want to reformat the drive and do some kind of advanced partitioning. I want to have 2 installs of Ubuntu11.04, that way I can have Unity AND Gnome 3. Is there a way I can partition it so they share the home and swap partitions? (2. / partitions, 1 /home and 1 swap) How would I do that?
I will also need 2 partitions for Windows 7 which I use for work. (No, I do not want to use VirtualBox) My Windows 7 cd creates a second system reserve partition. I don't know if this will make me run out of partitions. I hear you can only have a max of 4. My idea above has 4 partitions for Ubuntu alone.
Is there a difference between using GPT partition table when formating hard drives and MS-DOS partition table? What are the advantages/disadvantages of using either?
I have searched and didnt find a situation like mine so i thought id ask. i have a dual boot setup on my hp pavillion windows vista /dev/sda1 and backtrack linux 3,while trying to install backtrack 4 (which is ubuntu based) i deleted the former partitons for bt3. im not quite sure what i clicked but using the ubiquity installer it deleted my partition table so now my entire drive is listed as unallocated space. i have some very important files on my windows partition other wise i would just format and start over. how can i restore the partition table and boot to windows to atleast grab the important stuff. the drive hasnt been formatted so the info is still there i just cant get to it anyone have any ideas?
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 to an Asus EeePC 1000H (160GB HDD). (I know it will be slow because of Mutter/i945). The usb stick boots just fine but when it comes to the partition part it goes wrong.
I have 3 partitions:Windows 7 (50GB) This will be Ubuntu Netbook (50GB) DATA (60GB)
But the partition manager just shows 160GB of unallocated space. I have tried to reboot and create the partitions with other software (even with GParted LiveCD) but the result is the same.
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Linux 10.04 on my computer with following specs:
ASUS P5KR Mobo HIS 2600XT GFX 160 GB Hitachi Harddisk (SATA) 500 GB Hitachi Harddisk (SATA) - Only for Data.
The 160 GB Harddisk is currently split into 3 main partitions: i) 200 MB created by Win7 setup.
1) Windows 7
2) Leopard OSX
3) Partition formatted in Leopard as Journal which is empty, meaning I can convert this if I want and onto which I will install Ubuntu.
My problem is that despite booting up fine, installer starting and working fine, it cannot however detect my partition table, it thinks its unallocated.
The funny thing is that I can mount the partitions and view the data but the installer however can't see it.
I am using a 8 GB usb flash to create a F13 Live Media. I created it using the livecd-creator. But when I use it to try to boot, it says "No bootable partition in table". What's wrong? I did some searches on google, but didn't find a solution.
then I used dd to transfer data from the old drive to the new drive. Now I am unable to boot into the new drive. I tried to boot again from the live-CD but fdisk reports that the drive has no partition table. I can still mount the devices (e.g. mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3) and I can see all the files. But without a partition table, I can't set one partition to be bootable. Why doesn't gparted create a partition table? it created the filesystems just fine. how do I boot into the new disk? What do I have to do to make grub handle the new disk?
Using ubuntu minimal install 9.10 for a htpc. My boot drive is a 2Gb disk on module. When using advanced install I am eventually given the option to format the drive and ultimately the option to pick what sort of partition table type. I am not sure what to pick; it appears to have msdos as a default. Here are my options:
aix amiga bsd dvh gpt mac msdos (default?) pc98 sun loop
Some appear to be obviously bad choices; but I am not sure. Any ideas on which would be a better pick for me? I have already used msdos and it seems to work fine.
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 on my Eee PC 1015PE. but it appears that GParted which is used to partition the HDD is unable to successfully display partition table, it just shows that /dev/sda is all unallocated, and it offers just to create new partition table.
i cant install 10.04 on my desktop with the 32bit or 64bit versions of 10.04 desktop.
i get to step 4 and there is nothing listed for partitions or any information and if i click forward, i get that message "no root file system is defined" "please correct this from the partition menu"
I have just installed the newest Debian Stable 7.8 release on my new notebook. Before installation I had to free some disk space from the preinstalled Windows7 with ntfsresize and fdisk. In addition to the existing three primary partitions I created an extended one with three logical partitions for /(root) /home and swap, see the output of 'fdisk -lu'
For some reason I put a bootable flag on sda7, and the only small concern during installation was that some BIOS systems might not work with boot-flag no logical drives. Now, every time I boot I get this "Invalid partition table!' message which I must 'enter" away before I get to the GRUB menu.
I'm trying to install Fedora 10 from a USB memory stick on which i've installed Fedora-10-x86_64-DVD.iso and, early in the process of configuring the installation, i get messages about both my IDE hard drives having unrecognizable partition tables:
"The partition table on device sda (... my disk data ...) was unreadable. To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this drive."
Same for sdb.
My PC currently runs Fedora Core 4 (yes i know i should have gotten around to upgrading my OS earlier) and yes it recognizes both hard drives just fine.
The answers I've found on the web suggest to backup my drives and repartition. I'm not too hot on that "solution".
explain why a F4 partition table is not recognized by F10?
BTW, I've recently upgraded my motherboard, processor, DVD drive, regrouped both my IDE drives on the same bus, ... I consider it a miracle F4 still runs on this PC (although F4 does not support the motherboard's graphics card, so no X11).
I had a tri boot of Win 7 /XP and Mint...I was using EasyBCD 2.0 as a boot manager...I booted Mint by configuring the NeoGrub option in Easy BCD..I wanted to uninstall Win 7 and so what I did was the following
1. Edited BCD bootloader settings ...Marked XP as my default and deleted Win 7 entry...
2. Logged out and wiped my Win 7 partition
With my fingers crossed , i rebooted but Easy BCD booted flawlessly with 2 choices XP and Mint(GRUB)...As Easy BCD is not meant for XP, I thought of restoring original NTLDR of XP so that things would be in place and thinking that this cud avoid problems of detection by other Linux OS I deleted manually the Easy BCD menu.lst file and NeoGrub.mbr in my root...That was it , after I rebooted, I got boot screen of EasyBCD but whichever option I select,I got an error message that address not Valid-NTLDR not found or something like that I booted my XP live CD and like many times before ran
1.Fixmbr 2.Fixboot 3.bootcfg /rebuild
After that , now when I reboot , I am getting "Invalid Partition Table" On booting from a linux CD , I can see the files are in place..I have to get boot sector and partition table fixed...
I was trying to remove the physical volume from an old drive. So I opened gparted and told it to rewrite the partition table. The only problem is I targeted the wrong volume, I wiped the partition table on my 4tb raid5 array This 4tb array has everything! All my movies, tv shows, music. The only things I have backup up off site are my smaller files like documents. I was about to lose my whole media collection.
I did some research and found a solution that I will post here in the hopes that someone will google "I deleted the partition table on my lvm" and be find the solution.You should find in your filesystem a /etc/lvm/backup folder. LVM puts a copy of the crucial lvm information there every time you change the the volume group.
In this folder you will find a file for each volume group. In this file you will find the uuid for all of the physical volumes that make up that group.The first step is to recreate each physical volume with their original uuids. In my case I had only 1 physical volume, which was my raid5 array. My recreation command looked like this:
Now I have a physical volume with the same uuid it had before. It is essential that you correctly match up the uuids with the correct physical deviecs.The recreated pv is empty, the volume group needs to be recovered. This is done by using a special tool and the backup file. For me the command looked like this:
vgcfgrestore --file /etc/lvm/backup/raid5 raid5
This tells it to recreate the volume group using the information in the backup file. The backup files looks for the uuid of the PV, which now matches the correct volume. The coordinates in the backup file match up to the data on the array an suddenly everything is back!
When I deleted my LVM partition table I did not damage any of the actual volumes on the volume group, I just wiped out the table of contents. The backup file had the information needed to rewrite this table of contents.
I have installed HP g6 notebook from live-cd with 10.04 LTS across multiple partitions, only to find that the partition table is not setup correctly. I place the following mount points on separate partitions:
I have a Toshiba laptop, running Vista Home Premium SP2 with AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor, 1 gb ram & 150 gb HDD. I just shrunk the c: drive down to 92 gb to free up 43.5 gb so as to load the Fedora Linux OS into this free space & have a dual-boot configur'n. My problem is the partition table in the MBR. It shows 4 partitions there, so the fedora 13 Live CD which I use to install the OS cannot find a free spot in the partition table. I have the Ultimate Boot CD so I took a look at the MBR. Here are the 4 partitions that occupies its table:
c: is 17% free, d: is 99% free, the other two are 100% free Can you explain what is the purpose of D: ? How about the other two (with no drive letter)? I read somewhere that 'x17' code means 'hidden IFS (ex: HPFS)' & 'x27' means a rescue partition... true?
Would I be safe in replacing the partition table entry for #1, 3 or 4 with an entry for my Linux? (I have an editor that could modify the MBR). Or would it be better to leave MBR alone, put a boot program on a CD or USB stick, which boots Linux from the unallocated 'partition'? (have to somehow manually install Linux to the 43.5 gb area that I freed up).
I'm trying to define the partition table type (I want to set it to msdos) for an automatic installation using preseeding file. (Why? I want to setup a software RAID 1 with two 2TB disks, by default the installer uses gpt partition tabless on those disks, where it's tricky to install grub(2), as there is no mbr, and the root partition is on a md device) During manual installtion it is possible to set the partition table type (by setting debconf priority to low).
[Code]...
Does anyone know what I have to put in my config file so that a msdos partition table will be created Also any other solution is welcome. I just want to have my root partition on a raid 1 and have grub installed, so that it boots up (No other OS is installed on the boxes. Debian squeeze is used)
During a recent request to install fedora 11, I ran into an interesting problem. It seems that between fedora10 and fedora11, the developers switched from fdisk, to parted for creating the initial pre-mke2fs partition table creation.
It looks like the implementation of this is broken, as it's writing the partition table with overlapping cylinder boundaries. While this can sometimes be ignored, it can in certain cases cause significant data corruption.
On an installation I took it through, using the latest installation media, in both manual & automatic partition creation, the layout looked like this:
The last two partitions turn out fine, for some reason. However, those two partitions should not have overlapping cylinders. After my very first installation, the system was completely unbootable, and not even fsck wouldn't rescue it. If this is possible, then that means that a system that's been online for months or even years could simply drop out of functionality simply due to a byte or two of system-critical data falling on that last cylinder. Considering that a lot of the time kernel data ends up on /dev/sda1 (commonly the /boot partition), this is something that should not be ignored.
I have a 6TB external eSata bay (Lacie BigQuadra). I made a GPT table with only one big ext4 partition. All was ok. I resized the ext4 partition and I created a 1TB NTFS partition. I can use it on Kubuntu but Windows 7 tell me the partition is not formated. When I go back to Kubuntu, parted tell me that the secondary GPT table is not at the end of the disk and tell me it's probably an other OS that thinks the disk is smaller that its real size. It seems Windows 7 thinks the disk size is 2 TB (and modify automaticaly the GPT table and create a secondary GPT table on the middle of the disk).
What can I do to make my NTFS partition visible in Windows 7? What can I do to prevent Windows 7 to move the secondary partition table on the middle of the disk and to modify the primary GPT table ?
I have win 7 installed on a primary partition along with two other primary partitions containing a recovery partition and system files partitions. (don't know exactly what the latter is for.) I made a defrag and resized the win partition to make some free space for a primary ubuntu partition.I then inserted the 10.10 live disc and created a fat32 shared partition, a root (/), a /home Nd a swap in the advanced gparted menu, BUT every time I try to initiate the installation I get an error message saying that installer couldn't create the fat32.
I'm trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 on a brand new 500GB hard drive I just purchased and installed in my machine. I boot from the CD and instruct Ubuntu to install to this drive and tell it to "erase and use the entire disk" for this 500GB drive. After moving forward from that, I see it saying a message about creating an ext4 partition for root "/" and then shortly after the entire install dialogue goes away. All I am left with is the little circle cursors spinning round (mouse input still works) and the installation background. The HDD activity light was still on though. I gave it about 3 hours before I finally gave up and tried again.
When I tried again, I saw that it did create two partitions (root and swap) during the last attempt. The same thing happened, although now even mouse input isn't responding so my system is completely locked up. HDD activity remains active this time as well. Running Ubuntu from the CD works fine. The only problem I saw with it was when I ran gparted from the CD and tried to manually create a ext3 partition on my new disk drive. When I tried that, I ran into a similar occurrence (couldn't run any programs, eventually system locked up) and had to reboot.
I have a second hard disk but I have a lot of valuable data on that and don't want to mess around with it. It could be a hardware failure, but that seems unlikely to me as this is a brand new Seagate disk drive. I suppose I could try installing it on a spare partition on my other drive and see what happens, but other than that I'm out of ideas.
When using the manual partitioner on the fedora 11 installer on the live cd, both for 64 bit and 32 bit, it will not allow me to create a new partition. I understand that I have four primary partitions and it cannot have more than that, so I tried deleting one of the partitions, then creating the new ext4 partition for F11. It still fails and gives me the same bugsee attachment)
how to read this, especially since there is so much there. I see at the top it says that there are 4 primary partitions, could it possibly still be seeing 4 primary partitions when trying to create the new one, even though I am deleting one of them? Other than this, I truly have no idea what else I can do.
EDIT: Attachment wont load up for some reason, here is some of the error file: anaconda 11.5.0.59-1.fc11 exception report Traceback (most recent call first): File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/parted/disk.py", line 183, in addPartition constraint.getPedConstraint())
I've not jumped on the Alpha/Beta upgrade's this time round so have decided to upgrade by doing a fresh install. I'm using the normal desktop install cd via usb. On the drive setup I choose to manually setup the partitions. I deleted the partition which help Lucid. Created a new partition with the root path. All good so far. I selected my home partition and selected use as 'ext2', entered /home as the mount point. Clicking ok to return, showed the /home partition as marked to be formatted, I was unable to change this ... so I decided to quit the installer and reboot ...
1st problem ... the root partition for Lucid was deleted, and a new empty partition created, despite the fact I had not confirmed the actions.
2nd problem ... rebooting with the live cd (which I'm on now) and running the installer, it hangs when I select manual partitioning.
I created a bootable Debian installer on my USB flash drive. The Debian Installation Guide advises;
The hybrid image on the stick does not occupy all the storage space, so it may be worth considering using the free space to hold firmware files or packages or any other files of your choice. This could be useful if you have only one stick or just want to keep everything you need on one device. Create a second, FAT partition on the stick, mount the partition and copy or unpack the firmware onto it.
I want to put non free firmware packages on the stick but when I try to create a FAT partition in the free space using Disk Utility I get the following error;
Error creating partition: helper exited with exit code 1: In part_add_partition: device_file=/dev/sdb, start=661837824, size=7507093504, type= Entering MS-DOS parser (offset=0, size=8168931328) MSDOS_MAGIC found looking at part 0 (offset 0, size 657457152, type 0x00) new part entry
[Code] ....
I formatted the drive to clear it, created a new FAT partition and copied the Debian.iso to it again. When I tried again to create a partition in the free space the same error occurred.
I have an issue with Gparted v0.19.0 (Jessie) which has replaced v0.12.1 (Wheezy) which works fine. I had hoped to ask this question in Gparted's own forum, but after three weeks and multiple attempts no-one has approved my account there.
Unfortunately, my existing partition structure (on two different laptops) seems to be invisible to the new version of Gparted. Since parted seems to be used by the Debian installer, the Jessie installer cannot install on these machines without repartitioning the entire disk. That means that on such machines, the only option is to wipe everything or install Wheezy, then edit sources.list to upgrade to Jessie.
Both Gparted v0.19.0 and the Jessie installer report the entire hard disk as a single Fat16 partition,The same partitions which are invisible to Gparted appear as normal in the Places sidebar, of either Thunar or the PCManFM file manager. They can be mounted and used, seemingly without issue (I have experienced the same problem under Ubuntu/Lubuntu 15.10). Below, is the shell output of fdisk, which can see the partition structure and parted, which cannot:
