New laptop, clean SSD, UEFI, and gparted error

[oldfred]

If partitions look good I would use the w command. I am surprised that parted gives error but gdisk does not.

Since you have a larger SSD, I might make / a bit larger. I just have Ubuntu on my 64GB SSD and created two / partitions, current install and test/future. But my current install uses about 10GB of which 2GB is /home mostly .wine, but all other data in in /mnt/data partition on rotating drive.

[aeronutt]

First, THANKS for all the help, I would have given up and returned the laptop, no doubt.

So get this. I ran gdisk and executed the 'w' command, and it certainly appeared to update/write the GPT sections.
Rebooted, and parted still says GPT backup is bad!! Possible bug in parted or gdisk command?

Is there a third way to check? (in addition to gdisk and parted?)

And yea, I usually have 2 or 3 partitions for some version of Linux..one stable, 2 others for testing versions. Then a large data partition that I backup.

[oldfred]

I think those two are the only ones that work with gpt partitioned drives. Everything else is MBR based still.
If you use gparted does it also have the same error? I think is still is parted underneath the gui.

[aeronutt]

Yes, same error using gparted.

[aeronutt]

Follow up question:

- If I'm never booting Windows, can/should I create the efi boot partition as FAT32 or EXT4?

[fantab]

EFI is always FAT32, but I've also seen it as NTFS however rare. If dual booting with linux it has to be FAT32.

[aeronutt]

Thanks, I'll leave it as FAT32, and marked this as solved!! (Even with the descrepancy between 'parted' and 'gdisk'.)

Thanks again for all the great and timely help!!

[fantab]

gdisk shows nothing wrong.
parted (and gparted) still shows corrupted backup table.
Dare I write table to disk using gdisk 'w' command?

GPT disks keep a backup of the partition table. It is this table that is corrupt. So if 'rewrite' the backup table with a good 'primary' table then that error will be made good.

Gdisk with 'w' option does exactly that, it rewrites the backup table.
It should fix the error.

[aeronutt]

GPT disks keep a backup of the partition table. It is this table that is corrupt. So if 'rewrite' the backup table with a good 'primary' table then that error will be made good.

Gdisk with 'w' option does exactly that, it rewrites the backup table.
It should fix the error.

Well, after running gdisk, and using the 'w' command, gparted/parted still shows an error, gdisk does not. So there's still a decrepancy between what gdisk and parted are reporting.

[oldfred]

The author of gdisk posts in askubuntu. I might post a question there with gdisk/parted error inconsistency in title and see if he responds.
Explain or post the outputs from both gdisk & parted. And that you have done the w with gdisk to fix it.