Joop Beris wrote:

On Saturday 13 December 2008, Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

...

Can you guys please help? I really need to get it working and if you need more information I'd be glad to find it out.

I found out the same thing about two weeks ago with an HP laptop I was installing for someone else. I used to run openSUSE on it. I removed all the Linux partitions on it with the Gparted LiveCD and created a single NTFS partition of 12 GB. I figured I'd use the Wintendo partitioner to partition the rest of the drive. I even set the new parition to active, but no dice.

Gparted understood the disk layout, but the Wintendo XP boot CD would not. I tried a different Windows boot CD, but no luck there either. So I booted from the openSUSE 11 CD, removed and recreated the NTFS partiion I had made with the openSUSE disk partitioner. Still no dice. I even reinstalled openSUSE on it to see if that would work and it worked like a charm.

I finally managed to repartition the drive with a bootable CD from Partition Magic I had lying around. That saved my bacon, otherwise the disk would have been unusable...well, for anything other than Linux, which is not such a bad thing.

But I found it really strange that Wintendo failed to recognize the paritions, while Gparted, fdisk, cfdisk and the openSUSE disk partitioner all managed to identify the disk layout properly.

Makes me wonder what is at fault.

Joop

it's a windows thing it wants it on the first drive and the first partition period -- Hans Krueger hanskrueger007@roadrunner.com registered Linux user 289023 411024 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Joop Beris wrote:

...

...

Joop Beris wrote:

...

...

I found out the same thing about two weeks ago with an HP laptop I was installing for someone else. I used to run openSUSE on it. I removed all the Linux partitions on it with the Gparted LiveCD and created a single NTFS partition of 12 GB. I figured I'd use the Wintendo partitioner to partition the rest of the drive. I even set the new parition to active, but no dice.

On Saturday 13 December 2008, Hans Krueger wrote:

...

it's a windows thing it wants it on the first drive and the first partition period

See the part of my original post? I explained I removed all the Linux partitions and created a single, in other words first (and only) NTFS partition where I wanted to install Wintendo. Yet the Wintendo installer failed to recognize the partition. It even failed to recognize there was unpartioned space on the disk. It saw the disk, but claimed there was no room for it to copy files. Obviously it was wrong, since the disk was empty, it just failed to recognize the layout.

I tried to set the disk (which was SATA) to IDE emulation using the system BIOS, but this made no difference. It should not have either, since it was a disk of XP with SP3 embedded into it.

I hope I explained myself a bit clearer now.

Joop

well if that's the case I had to download the utilty of the hard drive manufacturer and zero out the drive then install windows first -- Hans Krueger hanskrueger007@roadrunner.com registered Linux user 289023 411024 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, 2008-12-13 at 15:59 +0100, Joop Beris wrote:

On Saturday 13 December 2008, Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

...

Can you guys please help? I really need to get it working and if you need more information I'd be glad to find it out.

I found out the same thing about two weeks ago with an HP laptop I was installing for someone else. I used to run openSUSE on it. I removed all the Linux partitions on it with the Gparted LiveCD and created a single NTFS partition of 12 GB. I figured I'd use the Wintendo partitioner to partition the rest of the drive. I even set the new parition to active, but no dice.

Gparted understood the disk layout, but the Wintendo XP boot CD would not. I tried a different Windows boot CD, but no luck there either. So I booted from the openSUSE 11 CD, removed and recreated the NTFS partiion I had made with the openSUSE disk partitioner. Still no dice. I even reinstalled openSUSE on it to see if that would work and it worked like a charm.

I finally managed to repartition the drive with a bootable CD from Partition Magic I had lying around.

Which version of PM, I have 8.0 and it failed to see the SATA?

That saved my bacon, otherwise the disk would have been unusable...well, for anything other than Linux, which is not such a bad thing.

But I found it really strange that Wintendo failed to recognize the paritions, while Gparted, fdisk, cfdisk and the openSUSE disk partitioner all managed to identify the disk layout properly.

Makes me wonder what is at fault.

I suspect that this is just plain Windows being Windows the only game in town. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, 2008-12-13 at 22:12 +0700, medwinz wrote:

On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 9:33 PM, Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

...

Hi List,

So I downloaded Gparted live cd, booted from it, then successfully shrinked one of my Linux partitions, and formatted it to fat32. It looks like this

/dev/sda1 extended boot, lba /dev/sda5 linux swap /dev/sda6 ext3 /dev/sda7 ext3 /dev/sda2 fat32

But when I insert windows xp sp2 cd and boot from it, it says something like "You have no hard drives attached... "

Your Windows XP doesn't know your hard disk. Maybe yours is SATA, I think XP need special driver for it. Anyway I use PartedMagic (http://wiki.partedmagic.com/index.php/Downloads) several time to resize ntfs disk without any problem.

I cannot say about SP2 but SP3 does recognize SATA drives, and does deal with them a darn sight better than Vista does! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 13 December 2008 10:41:27 am Felix Miata wrote:

"Something like"? What exactly?

Well, after 4 hours of googling, I eventually was able to make it recognize the hard drive, (yes, it is SATA) I had to change in BIOS configuration for SATA from "AHCI" to "Compatibiliy", and it worked (and by worked I just mean it didn't give that " no disk" message again) But now after windows copies all the files and goes for that 15 seconds reboot it starts all over again (copying files -> reboot), so it does not really boot from the hard drive. When I manually set from bios to boot from hard drive first, it gives me "Invalid partition table" message

How old is the motherboard, and what disk controller(s) does it use?

hmm... actually how do I figure that out? I bought is last year from Lenovo, so it shouldn't be that old.

Are you sure it's a SP2 CD? An original XP CD would have no SATA drivers.

Yeah I'm pretty sure it's SP2 (university provided copy)

Another problem is for PATA it would not see a partition located beyond 128G. The order of the partition entries you list above indicates the FAT at the end of disk, so if the disk is bigger than 120G, an original wouldn't see it.

That's right, the disk is about 200Gb, and yes fat32 is at the end of a disk. But is that true also with NTFS? because I also tried to do it with NTFS and it still didn't work. (Well except that now it recognizes the disk but keeps rebooting each time after copying the files) Thanks a lot, I guess this was really not the right place to post it and my apologies for that. I though it was related to Gparted but maybe it's a windows problem. Sergey -- Sergey Mkrtchyan, Graduate Student @ Department of Physics & Astronomy, Faculty of Science, University of Waterloo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday, 2008-12-13 at 13:18 -0500, Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

Thanks a lot, I guess this was really not the right place to post it and my apologies for that. I though it was related to Gparted but maybe it's a windows problem.

You know, it could be. It is a known thing that Linux partitioners and "partition magic" understand the partition table differently, and one says that what the other did is bad and want to repair it. I wouldn't be surprised that windows thinks that the partition is bad and fails because of that. (no, I have no idea what exactly is what they understand differently. It is just a comment on the man page somewhere) The other problem is that your first partition is not the windows partition. I don't know if that is viable. I can think of two possible solutions: backup all your Linux things somewhere else, then erase the partition and let windows initialize the disk, then add Linux. The other is getting hold of partition magic (it is payware, but maybe your university has it) and do some shuffling around. Ah, there is another method: run windows as a virtual machine under Linux, instead. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAklFASEACgkQtTMYHG2NR9UseACgk8XT/X4sTFBLXV7PsO+FkUsS nB4An0nSbz6of8G9zjVNmKiHKgTcYqRO =9z5h -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Carlos E. R. wrote:- <snip>

The other problem is that your first partition is not the windows partition. I don't know if that is viable.

That's not likely to be the problem, as I have a dual-boot and Windows is on the second partition. In my case, the first partition is only 100MB, formatted as ext2, and is mounted as /boot. What's more likely to be the problem is that the primary partition is after the extended partition and that's confusing the Windows installer.

I can think of two possible solutions: backup all your Linux things somewhere else, then erase the partition and let windows initialize the disk, then add Linux. The other is getting hold of partition magic (it is payware, but maybe your university has it) and do some shuffling around.

A third one, one you'd need to be very careful with, would be to use fdisk to "move" the partitions. First, you need to make a note of all the partitions on that drive, along with the start, end and ID. Second, delete the primary partitions. Any logical partitions inside an extended partition will be deleted at the same time as the logical, so there's no need to delete them as well. Third, create the extended partition as partition 2 making sure you use the correct values for the start and end. Fourth, create the logical partitions in the same order. As above, make sure you use the correct values for the start and end. Also, make sure the partition IDs match. Fifth, create the primary partition that will house Windows as partition 1. After the partition is made, fdisk will print a warning that the partitions are "not in disk order", but won't prevent you writing the partition table to disc. Sixth, boot using the Windows installation CD and choose the correct partition. As an example of this is practice, here's a series of snapshots of me doing the above using a virtual machine: URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.01.png URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.02.png URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.03.png URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.04.png URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.05.png And a couple after starting up my Windows XP installation CD: URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.06.png URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.07.png

Ah, there is another method: run windows as a virtual machine under Linux, instead.

And there is a good idea. Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: http://www.distributed.net/ OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s SUSE 10.1 32 | | openSUSE 10.3 32b | openSUSE 11.0 32b | openSUSE 10.2 64b | openSUSE 10.3 64b | openSUSE 11.0 64b RISC OS 3.6 | TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 10.3 PPC | RISC OS 3.11 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Robert Smits wrote:

On December 13, 2008 06:33:17 am Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

...

Hi List,

So I downloaded Gparted live cd, booted from it, then successfully shrinked one of my Linux partitions, and formatted it to fat32. It looks like this

/dev/sda1 extended boot, lba /dev/sda5 linux swap /dev/sda6 ext3 /dev/sda7 ext3 /dev/sda2 fat32

But when I insert windows xp sp2 cd and boot from it, it says something like "You have no hard drives attached... "

I also tried with NTFS, unallocated, but nothing seems to help. I did a lot of googling (these two days I'm stuck with it), tried different windows cd's. Tried ultimate boot cd...

Can you guys please help? I really need to get it working and if you need more information I'd be glad to find it out.

It's a thinkpad t61, running opensuse 11 with kde 3.5 (if that matters)

Sergey -- Sergey Mkrtchyan, Graduate Student @ Department of Physics & Astronomy, Faculty of Science, University of Waterloo

Sergey, I'm running exactly the same setup. I run openSuse 11.0 and dual boot with Win XP on a T61.

This week, all of a sudden, both gparted and partition magic said my drives were not recognizable, both my Windows partition and my openSuse partitions. They still worked and I could boot both OSes, however.

The partition managing programs could see the partitions on my usb drive just fine, but nothing on the main hd in the laptop.

I just backed everyhing up to a usb drive, and fixed the hd in the laptop by reinstalling xp from the Lenovo repair disks. This created just an NTFS drive and one 5 GB partition where it stored everything for a future reinstall. Then I could use opensuse gparted to shrink my Windows drive to 25 GB, create a 149 GB extended partition and create /, /home, and swap partions in that.

i haven't been able to identify what caused this to occur. I had recently installed KDE4 for evaluation, switching between 3.5 and 4.0. I had also added Amarok2 just before I noticed what happened to my partitions.

For now, I suspect this is due to installing KDE4 on a machine that already had KDE3, but I'm not certain about it at all.

GL, Bob

A possible cause would be bios changing from LBA to CHS if set to AUTO due to something being altered in the first sector. Its better to set LBA in the bios before setting the disk up to avoid this problem but remember that if the bios resets for some reason it defaults to AUTO. This problem will confuse windows and if a switch between LBA and CHS occurs Dos based programs ie. Partition Magic may not see your partitions. Regards Dave P -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Hi Robert, On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Robert Smits wrote:

I just backed everyhing up to a usb drive, and fixed the hd in the laptop by reinstalling xp from the Lenovo repair disks. This created just an NTFS drive and one 5 GB partition where it stored everything for a future reinstall. Then I could use opensuse gparted to shrink my Windows drive to 25 GB, create a 149 GB extended partition and create /, /home, and swap partions in that.

Yeah I'm stuck with that now, I have some valuable data on Linux partitions which I cannot boot now, so I'm just waiting till the end of the week (i.e. payroll ;-) ) to go and buy an external usb hard drive. My hope is that then I'll be able to boot with Knoppix, backup all my data on my hard drive, and try to do a fresh partitioning and reinstall of everything. Side question, did you get the Lenovo repair disks online, or you got them with the purchase? (I had only recovery partition which I was "smart" enough to get rid of it fairly quickly...). I still can go on their web site and look for all the software, but it brings bunch of stuff, and I don't really want to go and read each of them to understand if I need it or not. Sergey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org