[ale] Partitioning Problems

Andrew Grieser agrieser at gmail.com
Thu Dec 25 12:10:10 EST 2008


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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