How Do I Convert A Single Hard Drive To GPT Without Losing Data

hello,

i am using slackware 14.1 and my partition table is given below
Code:

 sda1                    Primary   ext4                             60003.42 
    sda2                    Primary   swap                              8998.46
    sda3                    Primary   ext4                            119998.61
                            Logical   Free Space                           0.10*
    sda5        NC          Logical   Linux                           120739.34*
    sda6        NC          Logical   ntfs                            190356.39*
                            Logical   Free Space                          11.56

and i want to change Code:

sda5        NC          Logical   Linux                           120739.34*

Logical to primary partition.i don't know how to do it.i searched over internet but i can't understand could u any body please guide me how to do it.Thanks in advance.

Booted my computer with 2 USB flash drives inserted. One of the drives turned out to be an MS-DOS boot drive. The PC booted in DOS and wiped out the partition table of the other flash drive with my data on it. This second (64Gb) drive had a single 64Gb type 83 (Linux) primary partition (ext4 file system).

Is there a way to recover the data that's on the second stick?

I've been told that all I have to do is repartition it exactly as it was and my data will be there. But I'd like to have advice from the pros here before I start messing with it.

For the time being, I dd-ed the entire stick, as is, onto a blank partition of my hard disk (dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda14). The process completed without errors but /dev/sda14 is unmountable for the moment.

Thanks for any help.

I was wondering if I can repair my current partitioning setup using gparted, or if I should just reload Xubuntu. Basically I screwed up by making the primary partition only 256M, and made a massive extended logical partition for everything else, and did not leave swap space. I am doing this on an older PC with MBR, dual processor, 2G RAM each processor, 160GB hard drive space. It is single boot, no Windows. I would like the partioning to be as follows, leaving empty disk space for other Linux flavors:

/ 13GB ext4
/home 50GB ext4
swap 8GB swap

sudo parted /dev/sda print all
Code:

Model: ATA ST3160812AS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 160GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size   Type      File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  256MB  255MB  primary   ext2         boot
 2      257MB   160GB  160GB  extended
 5      257MB   160GB  160GB  logical
                                                                       
Error: /dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-swap_1: unrecognised disk label

Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-root: 158GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number  Start  End    Size   File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  158GB  158GB  ext4
                                                                          
Error: /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt: unrecognised disk label

df -hT
Code:

Filesystem                   Type      Size  Used Avail Use Mounted on
/dev/mapper/xubuntu--vg-root ext4      145G  6.5G  131G   5% /
none                         tmpfs     4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev                         devtmpfs  989M  4.0K  989M   1% /dev
tmpfs                        tmpfs     201M  1.1M  200M   1% /run
none                         tmpfs     5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                         tmpfs    1003M   88K 1003M   1% /run/shm
none                         tmpfs     100M   24K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda1                    ext2      236M  120M  104M  54% /boot
/home/mbrk/.Private          ecryptfs  145G  6.5G  131G   5% /home/mbrk

Hey,

My PC has 298 GB of which approximately 179 GB is unallocated. The remaining estimated 119 GB is being used by two distro's: PCLinuxOS and Manjaro 0.8.12

When I have tried to add a new distro, having plenty of free space, I usually get a message telling me I can not proceed further due to my having four primary partitions.

I have a Swap partition of sufficient size to handle multiple distros almost 10 GB.

I installed PCLOS first and then Manjaro. I gave each approximately 12 GB for their 'Root' (/) Their Home (/home) partition was roughly 40 GB each.

{/dev/sda1 swap /dev/sda2 Extended (/dev/sda5, dev/sda6) "PCLinuxOS" /dev/sda3. /dev/sda4 "Manjaro 0.8.12"

For /dev/sda 5 & 6 I used 'Reiserfs' file system. For /dev/sda 3 & 4, I used Ext4.}

The way I look at it my root and home partitions are 'primary' thus taking up the four primary allowed. I seem ti either recall or seen somewhere, that beside 'Primary there was something called 'Logical'

Starting with PCLinux as a base could I make a new installation of Manjaro where (/) would be Primary and (/home) would be Logical?

Or would I need to start totally over with fresh installs of both Manjaro ant PCLinux?? Then make (/) primary and (/home) logical?

Would such a move allow me to install additional distros?

A thought could I make the changes in Gparted while keeping the distros as they are, just making the changes [primary & logical?]

TIA

herakles_14

Hi, yesterday I decided to install Deepin in a dual boot. I later decided I no longer needed/wanted it so I deleted the partition. Apparently I had grub on that partition as well, and now my laptop only goes to grub rescue and will not boot.
I have an acer aspire v5 touch. Removing the hard drive is not an option. I have tried to access UEFI but my computer just beeps and goes to grub rescue. I have grub rescue disk on a flash drive, I used unetbootin to do that, but iI cannot get to any boot menu (f12), and when I use ls (hd0)/ I get a unknown file system error. Please help, and sorry for my grammar/formatting, I'm on mobile.
Tl;dr: Deleted partition containing grub and deepin, now can only get to grub rescue, and I keep getting an unknown file system error, please help.

Hi

I am very suprised! I previously had a Windows 7 desktop, dual boot with Windows Server 2012 R2. I didn't care much about 2012 R2, so I went with a Debian server on another computer.

I wanted to triple boot my computer, so I looked at my BIOS to see if my computer has UEFI support, but it doesnt, so I am not able to boot to GPT. One decision lead to another, and I decided not to install Hackintosh. As part of this process, I had converted it to GPT, and then back to MBR when installing Windows 8.1 Pro. Everything went well.

When I went to install Debian 7, it was not recognizing anything on that drive. I found out it was a backup GUID partition table left over. I used fixparts found on rodsbooks.com, and I fixed the disk partition table.

Now this is where things get weird. Before installing, I created a primary partition for /, and an extended partition with 5 logical partitions inside it. I installed Debian 7 from a live install DVD, and I manually created the partitions. I created a 4GB /, 16GB /usr, 4GB /var, and 64GB /home. Then I left a bunch of free space (~145GB) and then 16GB swap space. (I have 8GB ram, and I plan to hibernate sometimes).

After a successful installation, installation of packages, reboots, and frustration with PCI card problems, I rebooted to Windows 8.1.

Upon opening diskpart gui, I was greeted with the picture attached.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

How can I make this Data partition be readable and writeable? I tried the "chmod 777" command, but was unsure of what directory to type in . I tried several but the command wouldn't start. This partition is on the second hardrive. I am just trying to get more storage on the second hard drive, so I hope I partitioned correctly. The drive was originally mounted as usr, but I managed to shrink that and make a new partition named Data.

I've made a couple attempts at installing these OS's on my machine and am still not getting it. I've actually been using AVLinux for about the past nine months, and it's working fairly well. And, yes, I know XP is down for the count, but for the moment it's the only MS option available to me - and I *need* to get it running for some work related web stuff...

This is all on a 32 bit AMD system btw.

What I've tried: Everything on one SATA drive. Partition one formatted to NTFS (about 20GB) for XP. Partitions 2 and 3 are Root and Home for AVLinux, Partition 4 at the end of the drive as the /swap for AVL.

All the how-to's and guides I've been able to come across point to (usually) Mint or Ubuntu's install dialog, and to select "something else" - which, by the way, is not a function of AVLinux's installation procedure. During install you can install GRUB to the MBR *or* root partition..

So, just to clarify to procedure (as I might have it now, but am very unsure) XP gets installed first (which is done at this point...) then my Linux distro *to the MBR* (?) then I need to add a stanza to GRUB telling it where XP lives? XP is not showing up on GRUB as I'm doing it, but I'm not too sure if installing Linux to the MBR (on the same physical drive as XP) actually wipes out the Windows bootloader....and if so, how chainloading would actually work...

So, any help appreciated, thanks.

On my current system I have drives sda, sdb, sdc; 1TB, 1.5TB, 1.5TB respectively.
SATA drive a is where I installed the OS and the other SATA drives b and c are from an old system that was linux software mirror, something I was using to play and learn. Now I have added b and c to my current system and before doing so I stopped the mirror and removed the partitions. I added the drives to my current system and used cfdisk to create one partition on each and then mounted the new drives. I then run ls and I see bin/....etc. listed in the new drive. Is this normal or when I create the new drive partitions should I use Logical instead of Primary.

Is there a way to get my drives back to non raid that I have missed doing?

Thanks

I've long wanted to delve into these methods of HD manipulation but here's the thing: I only have 1 hard drive -- a 1TB, and the more I read the more it seems the main point of using these techniques is to utilize that extra layer of abstraction to bridge HDD's in some version of a RAID setup.

Of course I've also read the performance is better, along with snapshot capability, on-the-fly partition resizing, striping, etc. These prospects excite me. So finally, two questions:

1) With just one physical drive, is it worth creating a new partition table to include these technologies?
2) With all of the above methods, there is no way I can keep the data on any part of this PV if I want to venture into LVM, ZFS or Btrfs, correct?

p.s. I've got 12 partitions (one swap, one extended, one very large one logical partition that serves the 9 linux distros which fill the remaining partitions as a hold of media, documents, music, etc.