I'ev been trying to isntall edbian onto a spare parittion, but the installer will only give me the option to install onto the whole drive, seeing just 120GB disk not my individual partitions. It used to see it, but it doesn't anymore. I've tried different CDs and versions. Yet, I'm still able to use my mandriva install fine. During the debian install, I exit the current step and choose the option to go to shell. I then create a dir called /target (read in one of error messages, so I assumed its where the installer mounts the install partition) and mounted /dev/hda7 to it. I then skip disk setup stage, and continue with the install despite a few errors. It seems to install the base system, but doesn't get to the stage of installing the kernel. Its been about a week or so and i can't remember the details. Anyhow, the problem still is that the installer can't see my partitions. i'm thinking this was due to using Paragon partition manager.
Sounds like that may be the case, sometimes 3rd party apps like that create partitions in... strange ways. They usually work to some extent, but may not be what the installer tools were expecting.
The only way it seems to be able to fix this is to wipe my drive, and start with a fresh partition table. Of course, I would lose my data as well. Which is not preferred since its a dual boot, and I really don't want to have to set up Windows again.
Well I've fixed it, sort of. For anyone who wants to know, I'll post the general steps. This is for people who have data they need to save! Problem: By using Paragon partition manager, I screwed up my partition table to an extent where it wasn't possible to be read for partition changes but still could be read to use a partition. The fix involved making a backup copy of the partition table, and reconstructing it as closely as possible using fdisk, or if preferred cfdisk. Step 1 Find a Linux Live CD so you can boot into a recovery environment without having to mount any of your disk partitions. For mine, I used Knoppix 5.1 and it worked very well. Once inside this environment, open up a terminal and login as root with Code: su From here, do Code: fdisk -l to see a basic idea of what your partition table looks like. To save this partition table and its geometry (like cylinders, heads and sectors/track) do Code: fdisk -l > /root/partitions . Or you can save that file onto a pen drive for safer backup as the file will disappear when you reboot. The partition table is kept in the MBR, Master Boot Record and is found on the block device /dev/hda (this device can be different, in this case its the first drive on the primary IDE channel) To make a backup of your MBR, use the dd command to make a byte exact copy of it. Code: dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1 Caution: Just because you have a backup of your partition table/MBR doesn't mean that your data is safe. If you mess around with the partitions, create new ones/delete old ones then you could destroy your data. It's important not to make any changes to the data while doing maintenance. Using cfdisk or fdisk Now you'll need to wipe your partition table clean, and start afresh. Using fdisk, you can use the 'm' key to find a list of commands. Its pretty straight forward. First press 'p' to print the current table to the screen. If you haven't already done so, make some notes about the number of cylinders, sectors per track and heads. Now, use the appropriate command to create a blank partition table. This will leave you with a clean table where you can add the appropriate new partitions. Remember, if you're using a Windows dual boot to use the msdos table format when prompted. Press 'x' to go to expert mode, then press m to see a new list of commands. Use the appropriate commands to specify the cylinders, heads and sectors information if its not already correct. Press r to go back to the main menu. Use the 'n' key to add partitions to the blank one from your backup. I suggest that for simplicity's sake you only add partitions which you need. When creating the new partition, specify the cylinder start/end numbers. Then use the 't' command to change a partitions type id to the one in your backup. E.g. Linux type 83, for Windows its 7 for NTFS. Unfortunately, because it can get really complicated I can only help so far. There can be 4 primary partitions, if you want more then you need to make 3 primary partitions and make the fourth an extended partition where you can divide it into more logical ones. Once you've added all the info, go to expert mode and press 'f' to fix the partition order. Then go back to the main menu and once you're done, look carefully at the new table and press w to write the table to disk. Now what? Reboot, and most likely if you've changed the table from the backup in a small way your bootloader won't work. Hopefully your partitions are still safe and working, and you can use a recovery CD to reinstall the bootloader.
Good walk-through. Yesterday I read about TestDisk at linux.com It reads and (hopefully) fixes bad partition tables.
Yes I've read about that, and also tried it. The problem was that there was a lot of phantom partitions still on the disk which weren't written over by data, so it picked up a lot of bad partitions.
