Hello, I recently purchased a Dell XPS 8700 that came installed with Windows 8. To get rid of the Windows 8, I booted into a live cd of Ubuntu and deleted EVERY partition on my 2tb harddrive. This included all of the GPT Headers and fake msdos. I then installed Windows 7 in the one giant partition I had made. However, if I boot into a livecd and launch gParted, gParted will give me an error message asking me if this is a GPT drive and if so then it doesn't contain the fake msdos as it should. Because of this error gParted says my entire harddrive is empty. Is this because I deleted all GPT partitions? Am I better off converting to MBR or restoring GPT? All I need is a Windows Partition, a Xubuntu Partition, and then a shared ntfs data partition to store music, videos, pictures, etc.
I found these instructions from a different thread that had similar problems to me:
Should I try this? Will this allow gParted to read my hardrive properly?
- Boot into the Ubuntu Live CD. Alternatively, get the latest version of Parted Magic or System Rescue CD, boot it, and skip the next two steps.
- Go to the GPT fdisk (gdisk) download page and obtain the latest version (0.6.13) for your architecture. I'm afraid I missed what that was, if it was stated. It'll be either the gdisk*i386.deb or gdisk*amd64.deb file.
- Install the gdisk package file. Double-clicking on the desktop should do this, or you can type "sudo dpkg -i gdisk*deb" in the appropriate directory.
- Open a shell and type "sudo sgdisk --zap /dev/sda". It'll complain about partition problems, but it will still work. Be sure to use the --zap option, not --zap-all; also, note that the command name is sgdisk, not gdisk.
- Proceed with your Ubuntu installation.
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