Problems with repartitioning a HP Pavilion Laptop

[Bill Stanley]

On 08/17/2012 04:10 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 17 August 2012 21:07, Bill Stanley<bstanle at wowway.com>  wrote:
>>> The PC MBR partitioning system only allows 4 primary partitions per
>>> drive&   you already had 3.
>>>
>>>
>>> If the drive was partitioned with MBR, then you need to create an
>>> extended partition as sda4 and then create the Linux partitions as
>>> logical ones inside the extended partition.
>>>
>>> The alternative to MBR on some modern machines is GUID.
>>>
>>> If you boot off a LiveCD and run GParted, it should tell you.
>>>
>>> I tend to recommend creating the partitions in advance with GParted
>>> anyway - it offers more control&   a better UI than the install
>>> program.
>>
>>
>> I used a USB flash drive to boot into Xubuntu and was able to run GParted.
>> I looked around the GUI and didn't find the information on if it is GUID.
>> Can you tell me where to find it?
>>
>> I did find under VIEW/device information this info...
>>
>> Model  - ATA Hitachi HTS54505
>> Size   - 465.76 GB
>> Path   - /dev/sda
>>
>> Partition Table - msdos
>> etc ...
>>
>> The other information is very good as well it is (some columns were
>> omitted)...
>>
>> Partition -                - File system - Label     - Flags
>> /dev/sda1 - (exclamation mark) - ntfs     -  SYSTEM    - ...
>> /dev/sda2 - (exclamation mark) - ntfs     -  ...       - boot
>> /dev/sda3 - (  ...           ) - ntfs     - New Volume - ...
>> /dev/sda4 - (  ...           ) - extended - Recovery   - ...
>> /dev/sda5 - (  ...           ) - fat32    - HP Tools   - ...
>> /dev/sda6 - (exclamation mark) - unknown
>> /dev/sda7 - (exclamation mark) - unknown
>> unallocated - ( ...          ) - unallacated
>>
>> It is obvious that the partition table is messed up by all the attempts at
>> installing Linux and then trying to recover the windows partition. As I
>> remember it, there were only sda1, sda2 and sda3 on the first attempt.  What
>> should I do next?  If I can make assumptions about sda1 and sda2 (the
>> exclamation mark), there is something wrong here and presumably it would be
>> better not to try to recover Windows, luckily, I have my user data. Should I
>> install Windows or Linux first?  I know that a Windows reinstall will
>> overwrite the GRUB boot loader.  But If I go with Windows first, I might not
>> get the option of leaving unallocated space for Linux.

Bill Stanley