[ale] Partitioning Problems

[Jim Kinney]

For reasons that involve much profanity, I have never been able to partition
a drive with a Linux partition in place (unformated) and then install M$ on
the reserved partition. I have always had to  make a winders partition,
leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned, install blunders, _then_ do the
Linux work and partition the remaining drive portion. Otherwise it seems the
blunders install hoses the drive partitioning even outside the winows space.
I suspect the UUID key crap it writes to prevent moving drives from machine
to machine but have not really looked into it.

I have seen "boundary errors" with windows stuff before. It expects to be
the only thing on the drive so it can't end except on a cylinder boundary.
You will need to get real cylinder counts and block sizes and determine how
many blocks in a cylinder and set partitions to end on a cylinder edge.
Windows just won't work right otherwise.

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Andrew Grieser <agrieser at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I decided to wipe my drive and re-partition so that I can boot multiple
> operating systems, however I am having a difficult time getting it to work.
> The funny thing is, I have done this before and have gotten it working with
> no problems. I'm a bit confused as to why I can't figure this one out.
>
> The drive is an 80GB IDE drive, and I want it partitioned as follows (In
> order from the beginning of the drive):
> 5.5 GB NTFS
> 70.0 GB Extended
>        17 GB Logical EXT3
>        17 GB Logical EXT3
>        17 GB Logical EXT3
>        17 GB Logical EXT3
>        2.0 GB Logical SWAP
>
> I'm pretty sure that this is exactly as I had done it in the past, the
> problem is that it won't work.
>
> Here's what happened: I repartitioned using the gparted live cd (which
> seemed to go fine) and went to install windows, however the windows disk
> would not boot. I googled it and found this was a problem related to
> partition setup. I booted "system rescue cd" and ran testdisk, which listed
> the partitions, but complained about bad cylinder/head count (16 vs 255 or
> something similar) on all the partitions.
>
> I went ahead and installed ubuntu on one of the 17 GB EXT3 partitions, and
> installed grub on the same partition as root. I was going to use "gag" as a
> bootloader to boot multiple operating systems. Doing it this lets each
> operating system maintain it's own grub configuration. This is how I have
> done it in the past, and have never had issues.
>
> The Ubuntu install appeared to work fine, so I went ahead and installed gag
> (bootloader). This is when I ran into problems. The bootloader only lists
> two EXT3 partitions, and I can't boot to either of them. It should be
> listing 4.
>
> After playing around a bit, I used testdisk to erase the partition table,
> then zeroed the drive, and repartitioned it from scratch. However, I have
> the same issue.
>
> I thought maybe the drive was going bad, so I grabbed another drive...only
> to have the same issue. I've tried repartitioning on the Ubuntu live cd, and
> again, I have the same issue. I've even tried leaving out the NTFS
> partition, but again I get the same result.
>
> Does anyone know how to fix this? Is there a better way to do this?
>
> In the mean time I've installed Ubuntu using the automatic "erase drive and
> install ubuntu" option, and it's working fine.
>
> Andrew
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>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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