Ubuntu Installation :: Which Partition Table Type To Use On Fresh Install?
Apr 19, 2010
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 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).
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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)
i used to have ubuntu 9.i decided to move to sabayon so i used the live cd to install it ,resize the ubuntu partition and use the remaining space for sabayon.while the resizing procedure i got an error(i dont have a copy of the error log file but i know it has something to do with an anaconda process).i aborted the installation and the result was an filesystem that couldnt be mounted.when i try to mount the hdd i get this:
Code: Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so and this is what i get from fsck: Code: $ sudo fsck -f /dev/sdb1 code....
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:
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 was installing opensuse 11.2 in parallel with windows xp.but during installation suddenly power has gone and after that opensuse is giving me the error message corrupt partition.i am also not able to login in xp. so I decide to reinstall windows, I got the error saying "invalid partition table" after the first restart of windows xp installation.
I tried to use windows system recovery console and committing fixmbr and fixboot commands, but didn't work. i have 2 window partition(1 for windows and 1 for data).i do,nt want to format 2,nd partition.
How can I installed windows?My plan was first to install windows xp, then opensuse again.
I have never seen this before wit any previous versions of ubuntu - wondering if anyone else has seen it or can explain it. The break down of the partition table is being viewed with Ranish Partition v2.43 It's old program, but it has been really handy.
What is happening is: Prior to the install of ubuntu on the 3rd Primary partition, you'll see that the 4th partition (which has a couple of logical partitions in it) starts at: (14,380 - 0 - 1) ===> Cylinder - Head - Sector After the installation of Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS it shows a Non-conventional start point of: (14,380 - 0 - 62) =====> Cylinder - Head - Sector. An unused is left between the 3rd and 4th Primary partition.
This is not a big deal - just unusual (IMO) With the same partition layout (pre install) It doesn't matter if I install ubuntu on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd primary partition. The 4th one ALWAYS gets changed this way.
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.
Purpose: Python, PHP, WebKit (hopefully), and pyqt development. There is Wubi for Ubuntu, which I am using right now. But Ubuntu 11.04 doesn't work well with my system. There is a Wubi like installer for Puppy Linux. There is Debian Win32 installer, but I think that does touch the partition table. My last option is to simply grab Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and hope it works. Would that be a viable solution considering my needs?
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.
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.
I have installed the fedora 13 x86_64 live cd. I updated fedora as well as installing gparted.y hard disc containing my operating systems is not being read by gparted.unalloacted partition table. Also i am not able to mount a ntfs parition on the same hard disc.I did create the partition table on all hard discs with gparted livAnybody else had this problem? A kernel crash is also reported.DIT:I booted ubuntu 10.04 and opened gparted v5.1 without any problem. I booted fedora 13 again and now gparted 5.2
As soon as I install and reboot OpenSUSE, my partition table gets lost somehow. Here is some information about my system:
Dual-booting system with Vista and OpenSUSE 2 SATA hard drives combined into one with Vista installed on them. 1 IDE hard drive with OpenSUSE installed on it.
When I install OpenSUSE, it loads fine right after the installation. Then, when I reboot the computer and select to load OpenSUSE from the Grub loader menu, it hangs right after:
root(hd4,1) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-IC35l....... and so on
I tried running System Repair off of a DVD and automated test - it tells me that the partition table is lost. I choose to recover partition table and after a while it does but I am still unable to boot.
I installed openSUSE on a XP runnng computer and every thing is OK.When I tried to Install a new XP, I got this error:Code:Invalid Partition Table I fixed it by reinstalling GRUB using Rescue System.I tried fix mbr on XP Repair System and I got that error again.Now I want to keep XP and remove openSUSE. But computer only boots by GRUB and XP's boot loader is unable to boot and shows that error
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?
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.
Do i have any chances to restore my windows partition table after tried to install debian and i used the entire disk instead of the free space i had alocated for this
after i figured out what i did i stoped the installation but was to late ... i answered yes at write partition table changes on disk question
i tried win7 automate recovery tool from dvd and manual install of mbr with no successful result
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.
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 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).
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'd like the final layout to have a Windows partition (will start out as XP and will become Win7 when I can afford yet another copy), a partition for Ubuntu, and a shared Data partition that I can use for all my files between both OSs. I think this should be fairly straight forward with Linux on a Primary partition with / and swap. Only thing is, from what I've read (and yes I know this is a bit old school) it might be a good idea to put in a /Home partition so that I can reinstall new upgrades and maintain settings. But I don't want to max out my 4 primary partitions so I can use a 4th partition as a kind of sandbox for OS testing without using VirtualBox all the time.
This leaves me in need of some advice, I've never used Fdisk and I was planning on just using the Ubuntu installer to do all of this, but I don't know if I can create /Home as a logical partition in the main Ubuntu partition and still have the benefit of being able to reformat /root without losing /Home. I might have just confused myself, because no matter how many guides and How Tos I read I still don't really get extended partitions, I understand logical vs. primary but extended is...confusing. I need the Ubuntu partition to be bootable, so it needs to be a primary partition...I think. Unless I can have: /boot, /, swap, and /Home...
Also, if Ubuntu can read NTFS, and Win7 can read Ext3, what should a do with /Data? Or should I just go with FAT32 and be done with it. (It's a big HDD btw, 640 GB, so /Data will be fairly large)
I want to change my sda2 partition to ntfs type. i have installed GParted but it is returning a strange type of error. Here is the error dump file...
[Code]...
WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot. WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot.
