installing 9.4, gparted says "unallocated", wrong!

[Lesconrads]

Gentlemen, I have a problem installing a third OS on my Dell vostro 1500.

Gparted says, that my whole internal HDD is unallocated - which is WRONG.
My external HDD with the backup gets shown correctly. One big ntfs thingie like I created it with.



ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 307337216 312578047 2620416 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 240975 21205799 10482412+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 21205800 281667644 130230922+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 281667769 312578047 15455139+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 307337216 312578047 2620416 dd Unknown
/dev/sda6 281667771 301475789 9904009+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 301475853 307323449 2923798+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
You can see: I have a recovery partition, a dell media thingamajig, my Vista-installation and on the (ahm...) extended partition Ubuntu 8.10 and the ubuntu swap.

My goal is to get some 10 gb of my Vista partition, move it to the extended part and get 9.4 running for testing purposes (and having a working ubuntu whilest getting 9.4 to work).

Why is gparted - in the installer aswell as in this live-cd I am using currently ASWELL as in my working ubuntu 8.10 showing wrong partition information? In every case, I can mount the partitions!

Thanks a lot for any input
Les!

[Mark Phelps]

OK, couple of things ...

First, do NOT use GParted or any other Linux utility to shrink your Vista partition; instead use the Vista Disk Management utility. If you do otherwise, you run the risk of corrupting the Vista OS partition, which can then only be fixed by booting from a Vista DVD and running Startup Repair repeatedly until it finds no more problems.

Second, there seem to be continuing problems with the desktop LiveCd version of GParted detecting some installations properly. Suggest you do the following: either download and burn a GParted LiveCD (from distrowatch.com) and use that to create the Linux partitions, or download and burn the Alternate CD, and use it.