Not to be

corblimey

As per thread below, I don't think I'm destined to get Ubuntu installed on my main machine. Every time I get as far as partitioning, but it doesn't let me resize the XP partition. I then gParted and it gives me a warning to run chkdisk and then reboot twice. I've run chkdsk about 5 sodding times, defragged numerous times (in safe mode) and rebooted probably a dozen times. Every time, the error comes back up in gParted. I'm assuming this is why the Ubuntu installer partition editor isn't let me in either.

Right now, gParted is showing:

Partition	Filesystem		Label			Size		Used		Unused		Flags
/dev/sda1	fat32						4.97GiB		3.78GiB		1.19GiB
/dev/sda2	!ntfs			HP_PAVILION		181.33GiB	---		---			boot
unallocated	unallocated					7.38MiB

Clicking on the ! gives me

* Warning: The disk has bad sector. This means physical damage on the Disk *
* surface caused by deterioration, manufacturing faults or other reason. *
* The reliability of the disk may stay stable or degrade fast. We Suggest *
* making a full backup urgently by running ‘ntfsclone –rescue –‘then *
* run ‘chkdsk /f /r’ on Windows and reboot it TWICE! Then you can resize *
* NTFS safely by additionally using the –bad-sectors option of ntfsresize*

How would I use this -bad-sectors option in gParted? How does gParted know about my bad sector so quickly? This comes up almost immediately upon starting up. It takes chkdsk many hours - I don't know the results of the chkdsk, by the time I come back it's rebooted - if there were errors, would I know about it?

Any sort of help would be appreciated.

corkie

Have tried installing to external usb Hard drive?

you probably need to run something like grc's spinrite on your own hard drive if chkdsk is not repairing the system.

If you are removing windows completely, you could delete the partitions and use fdisk to repartition your drive.

corblimey

I considered it. I suspect that my current h/d is dying and there's no room for a new internal h/d. I selected 'use entire harddrive' option once in the parted, but it failed also (presumably for the same reason all other attempts have failed)

Any good guides for installing to an external h/d? Will I still be able to access my NTFS drive and (more importantly) other external drives once I've done it? Will the GRUB thingy be clever enough to load XP from my internal drive and Linux from my external drive? How do I know if my machine can boot from an external h/d?

corblimey

Apologies for double post, but if anyone is interested in this, I got it working using this great guide There's a few changes to be made for the latest version of Ubuntu, but everything is there.

I now have Ubuntu working on an external hd.

My only problem is that I cant' get my bios to automatically boot from it, it will boot if I select a boot order manually, but the external h/d doesn't seem to be visible in the actual bios boot setup screen.

An Fear Aniar

Glad you got it working. Is there not an option to boot from USB?


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ethernet

Do you have a machine using RAID0? Saw the same error when trying to resize an NTFS partition on a Dell using this fake RAID crap a few months ago. Needed to do the full scandisk and let it repair the dodgy sectors.