My Debian 7 Installation Created More Than 4 Primary Partitions On My MBR Disk!!!

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

Did it again!

Last week, with help from this forum, I was able to install Linux Mint 17.1 dual boot with Windows 8.1. It worked so well, I decided to explore other Linux distros recommended by forum members as some I wanted to check out.

I was using Unetbootin to download and install these as live sessions on my Windows 8.1 partition.

On my last such download, something went wrong, and no doubt I caused the error, but no clue as to how.

When I opened up this PC, I got the normal dual boot option for Windows and Mint. When I selected Windows, I found an additional dual boot option between it and Unetbootin! Somehow I created a partition (?) on my C Drive for Unetbootin (see Thumbnail below).
This Unetbootin option only goes to a page for me to choose another OS. Further, when I rebooted, the Windows/Mint dual boot option no longer existed, just the Windows/Unetbootin one.

Been checking out various articles and websites about BCD/MBR repair, but nothing definitive (that I can understand) about modifying these to delete the Unetbootin partition and restoring the Windows/linux dual boot.

Naturally, this is a newbie land mine area, so I'm very reluctant to try anything I can't fully understand, which is the category everything I've Googled on this topic falls into.

Anyone know how I can resolve this short of a complete start over
installation based on steps that basically a PC fence post can follow?

TIA
Cheers!

Hi

My machine was a dual boot debain + W7. The debian had LUKS encryption and LVM.

I had to re-install W7 and now there is no access to the grub menu and of course to the debian installation.

I tried "boot repair disk"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/
, but it couldnt access the encrypted volume. It did generate the following output:
paste.ubuntu.com/10591353

Would appreciate help how to get the boot repair disk to access the encrypted partition and recover the grub menu

Thanks

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.

Hello

My harddrive on my home server computer seems to have corrupted, likly due to some recent power outtages (using it as a home nas, game server, nothing important really)...
It was previously running windows 7 because I took the harddrive from my old computer, but now as I have to format it anyway I might as well do it right.

Since my server does not have a CD drive (that works) I am hoping for a way to intall Debian onto the harddrive from my main computer (running windows 8).
I have plugged it in, and the drive seems fully functional.

I'm not very skilled with Linux, and am completely on bare ground. My googling has not come up with an answer that I have understood yet.

TL;DR - How do i install Debian onto a secondary harddrive plugged into my computer take this drive and put it into another computer and boot from it?

Good day everyone,

I'm currently a student and as far as I'm aware I still need windows for some program I need, but I am going over to Linux.
(Thus I'm running Windows 8 at this moment)

Today I was going to install Ubuntu 14.04.01 alongside Windows 8, everything went well till I hit the 4th step (Installation type page) of the installation:

A message like follows showed:
"This computer currently has Debian GNU/Linux (Kali Linux 1.0.7) on it. What would you like to do?"

There are then 3 options available:
1) Install Ubuntu alongside Debian GNU/Linux (Kali Linux 1.0.7)
2) Replace Debian GNU/Linux (Kali Linux 1.0.7) with Ubuntu
3 and 4 is greyed out.
5) Something else (You can create resize partitions yourself, or choose multiple partitions for Ubuntu.

I just want to make sure what option to choose, I cant afford to lose all my data and windows.

Problem: Showing Kali Linux as current OS and not Windows 8.

Possible reason for showing Kali Linux as current OS:
I have a live CD of Kali Linux and ran it a few times in the past, but according to my knowledge it shouldn't have changed anything.

Maybe the 1st option is still the right one even though the current OS isn't listed right? Or the 3rd option is like a manual setting I guess.

Thanks for the time reading and helping!

I have tried installing a Ubuntu OS onto a partition (sda3).
When I had difficulties with the install, I decided to delete everything from the partition.

But now when I boot the computer, I get taken to the 'grub rescue' prompt.
I have tried to find grub in my other partitions (sda1 and sda2).
However, the command 'ls (hd0,msdos1)/' for example, does not show a grub directory.
It must've transferred grub to sda3 somehow and now I've deleted it.

I have debian live USB and am trying to install grub with:
Code:

apt-get install-grub /dev/sda

But I get the error message:
Code:

bash: grub-install: command not found

So now I don't know what's going on. Can anyone please help?

Hello!

TL;DR: Deleted Linux partition from Windows. Stuck at Grub rescue prompt.

I'm sorry to trouble you guys, because I'm an idiot.

So I'm wanting to dual-boot Kalilinux and Windows 8.
I went through the steps such as creating a bootable USB, changing the
boot order and so on. I get into Kali, start Gparted and try to partition stuff.

I'm far from an expert, so I wasn't sure what to do. Long-story short, I
didn't seem to get Kali installed correctly, due to something with an EFI
drive being required. So I boot into windows and then stupidly, because it said in the guide,try to "uninstall" Kali by removing it's partition, inside Win8 haha... So I did.

Now I simply get the Grub rescue command prompt when I boot from the same
USB and I have no idea how to fix it. I've run bootrec.exe/fixmbr in Windows haha,
for what it's worth. However Grub can't find any partition it says.

In windows, I have like... 2-3 Recovery partitions. Does anyone know how to remove
them??? I've tried to clear as much as I can, besides the C drive and Auxillary D drive.

Any advice would be very appreciated.

How do I convert a single hard drive to GPT without losing data and without re-installing.

Current systems
Windows 7 Partition /dev/sda1 (Primary)
xubuntu 14.10 /dev/sda5 (Logical) (maybe upgraded to 15.04 when released)
Swap /dev/sda6 (Logical)

I read some guides they were not clear. They also said it is better to do a clean install of each system. None of the guides give a step by step, they always leave something out.

I am not turning on secure boot but I am turning on uefi.

I have a Mini-partition wizard boot cd that can help out but wouldn't covert a system partition.

I have a way to make an iso for xubuntu 14.10


When do you turn on UEFI in the bios before or after converting drive?





Mod, please move to correct forum if needed

I tried to install Debian 8 and 7 but I get error message at partitioning stage:

"Failed to create a file system
The ext4 file system creation in partition #1 of SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed."

After that I couldn't advance further.

I booted from a live Debian and the HardDisk actually shows there with some older files on it.

I tried to install even Windows but from the start it shows the computer doesn't have a Hard Disk Drive so the installation stops right at the start.

Any ideas what is wrong and is there any fix?