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Partitions are not shown by Salix Live Installer nor gparted

Posted: 11. Feb 2012, 12:40
by Mats
i tried installing from the (1337) livecd, and the installer on the desktop could not see any partitions, niether could gparted. They only showed the total disk space as "unpartitioned space". so i could not install...
I went into a brief state of panic, but when i tried using cfdisk, all pertitions were as they should. i have one disk, with a lot of partitions, 2 for windows, 4 for linux and one for swap.

Is this problem known ?

Re: Partitions are not shown by Salix Live Installer nor gpa

Posted: 11. Feb 2012, 15:35
by Shador
This post was completely unrelated to the other, quite old thread where it originally was posted (http://www.salixos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=2904). Therefor I splitted the topic. Please create a new topic in the first place for the future especially if the other thread is very old. Unless of course it's really the same problem, which is quite obviously not the case here.

What partmap are you using (gpt, mbr, ...)? Are there multiple blockdevics in your machine? What is the partition layout of all of them?

Re: Partitions are not shown by Salix Live Installer nor gpa

Posted: 11. Feb 2012, 19:02
by Mats
Jawohl, dont know how i thought

anyway the table is down right messy :D not sure if it is mbr or whatever, but it has been around on this disk at least 6 years, still working fine.

this is the only block device in the computer apart from the CDrom

Code: Select all

root[linux46]# fdisk -cu /dev/sda
omitting empty partition (5)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 80.1 GB, 80060424192 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9733 cylinders, total 156368016 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5fc8b5a8

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    37190474    18595206    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2        37190475    53833814     8321670   83  Linux
/dev/sda3        53833815   156360644    51263415    5  Extended
/dev/sda4        81931563    97980434     8024436   83  Linux
/dev/sda5        53833941    57930389     2048224+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda6        57930453    81931499    12000523+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7        97980498   141179219    21599361    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda8       141179283   156360644     7590681   83  Linux


Re: Partitions are not shown by Salix Live Installer nor gpa

Posted: 18. Feb 2012, 00:21
by Mats
the problem is that gparted, in newer versions totly refuses to deal with mbr tables containing an extended partition containing more than 3 other partitions. and the installer depends on libparted, by the looks of it.

I suppose i could download the full install cd and try to install from it, it will absolutely work if i could just select a partition to install to.

Re: Partitions are not shown by Salix Live Installer nor gpa

Posted: 18. Feb 2012, 12:49
by Shador
Mats wrote:the problem is that gparted, in newer versions totly refuses to deal with mbr tables containing an extended partition containing more than 3 other partitions. and the installer depends on libparted, by the looks of it.
That's not true:
Image

The actual problem is that your MBR is just not valid/ not standard conforming.
On Linux logical partitions are enumerated from 5 on so everything below i.e. 1-4 is a primary partition. So /dev/sda4 is a primary partition and /dev/sda5 e.g. is a logical one.
Now looking at your partition table:

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   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda3        53833815   156360644    51263415    5  Extended
That's your extended partition. It spans until the end of the disk. An extended partition must be contiguous and can be subdivided in as many partitions as you want (only OS limit the number of partitions they support per disk).

But next INSIDE the extended partition you have a primary partition (4 < 5 --> primary)! But an extended partition may only contain LOGICAL and NOT PRIMARY partitions.

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/dev/sda4        81931563    97980434     8024436   83  Linux
You can see by the start and end values that it's contained in the extended partition: 53833815 < 81931563 < 97980434 < 156360644

This the problem with your partition layout. You put a primary and not a logical partition within the extended partition and that's not allowed. That makes gparted choke, which is understandable. I was not even able to construct such a partition layout with either gparted or cfdisk.
You now have two options to fix your layout:
1) Move the primary/extended partition so they don't overlap anymore.
2) Possibly you can somehow convert that primary partition into a logical one, which should also fix it.

This is probably not straightforward because your first two logical partitions /dev/sda5-6 are physically located in front of the 4th primary partition /dev/sda4.

Re: Partitions are not shown by Salix Live Installer nor gpa

Posted: 19. Feb 2012, 11:30
by Mats
Thanks for your reply, i figured this out myself, in the end. had i known that sda1-4 was reserved for primary partitions i would have done so sooner :D

probably the ipcop installer allowed to make a primary partition inside an extended one. it may use sfdisk --force allowing for all sorts of misbehavior. it was the IPCop root partition that was sda4.

The remedy? not so difficult. Simply deleted the partition, re-created it as a logical partition within the same cylinder boundries, and updated all fstabs accordingly.
then i put Salix on it.

I liked the live installer very much once it liked my disk, good job guys!