9.10 Partition problem during install?

[Steve'O]

I am trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 x64 onto a new drive with Windows 7 x

64 on it. Here is a shot of my partition under Win 7:



When I try to install 9.10 and get to the partition screen I have the following problem. It does not show the accurate partitions. The bars are solid with no slider. When I try to use largest space option, it says space is too small. The partitions are incorrectly displayed all together when you try to do it manual as well.

Any ideas?

[Steve'O]

Anyone have any idea?

[stlsaint]

Try going into System>Admin>partition editor at the livecd to double check there if you can see correct partitions. Also what partitions are being displayed under the manual option at the install.

[Steve'O]

Yes, I tried going into the partition editor through the live CD and got the same result. Here is what was shown in the Ubuntu partition:

free space 0 MB

/dev/sda1 fat32 209 MB 209 MB

free space 1 MB

/dev/sda2 2498489 MB unknown

free space 0 MB

I had 9.10 running no problem on a 32 bit vista system. Is this a 64 bit issue?

[Steve'O]

Anyone have any ideas?

[oldfred]

If the partition has flags set because it will want to run chkdsk or is in hibernation Ubuntu and I think gparted will not mount it. Did you hibernate or when you boot windows does it want to run chkdsk or is it clean?

[srs5694]

Boot a Linux emergency disc or Live CD, open a shell, and type the following (you may need to add "sudo" to the start of the line):

fdisk -l

Post the results. This will tell us what's really on your disk, with some precision.

It sounds like libparted (upon which most Linux partitioning tools are based) may be getting confused. There are a lot of posts about this here. You may be able to work around it by using fdisk instead of libparted-based tools to create your Linux partitions, but I can't promise this will work, since I don't fully understand what's causing these problems or how much the Ubuntu installer relies on data from libparted.

[Steve'O]

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -1
fdisk: invalid option -- '1'

Usage: fdisk [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK Change partition table
fdisk -l [-b SSZ] [-u] DISK List partition table(s)
fdisk -s PARTITION Give partition size(s) in blocks
fdisk -v Give fdisk version
Here DISK is something like /dev/hdb or /dev/sda
and PARTITION is something like /dev/hda7
-u: give Start and End in sector (instead of cylinder) units
-b 2048: (for certain MO disks) use 2048-byte sectors
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

[oldfred]

The fine print says you have a gpt partition which is the newer partition version used by apple and windows servers. Many tools are still based on MBR partitions but have updates to make sure they do not destroy GPT partitions. Linux works with GPT but you have to use updated tools.

GPT fdisk Tutorial -srs5694 in forums
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/
The emergency disks I know of that include GPT fdisk are:
* SystemRescueCd
* PartedMagic

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/fdisk-...eater-2tb.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gpt/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
MBR details including 2TiB limit and GPT link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

I ddi not notice that srs5694 was posting in this thread, he knows a whole lot more than me on GPT.

[Steve'O]

OK, I have been looking at numerous threads about GPT disk partitions and I do not see a straight forward process for installing Ubuntu. Does anyone have experience installing Ubuntu on a Windows 7 system with this partition situation?