Crazy partition situation!

[McAwesome]

After meddling with my partitions way more than I should have (don't ask, long story). I've managed to make it so that I have 2 3gig partitions, and my major one that has linux mint 14 cinnamin on it. All of them can't be changed acording to all the partition managers I have (I've tried everything). So I was wondering if anyone knew how to reset a Dell Studio laptop to dafalt, even with linux on it. Everything I read online is for people that have windows on it, and did I say that the partitions are in the wrong format for me to install windows on it? I would really love the help!

[viking777]

McAwesome, there is so much missing from your post that you cannot hope to get an answer to it as it stands now. The first and most obvious thing you fail to mention is whether or not you can boot it? If so what can you boot? If Mint is bootable the the first thing to do is to either run the command line and give us the output of

Code: Select all

sudo fdisk -l

or run gparted and post a screenshot of the partition arrangement on the forum.

The next thing to understand is that no partition manager is going to manage any mounted partition. So if you are trying to run gparted for example from your mint installation (which we don't even know if you can boot yet) then it will not be able to do anything much at all because the likelihood is most partitions will already be mounted. In order to work on your partitions you can either unmount them first (though not the / partition) and then work on them or better still, boot from a linux based recovery cd such as parted magic http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=down ... R9yD9231pg which has gparted on it.

The next unanswered question relates to your request about 'resetting to default'. Most laptops have a recovery disk which will reset the machine to factory settings, but there is one proviso, most of them require a system recovery partition in order to do it. At this stage we don't know if you have either of those.

Finally a word of warning that is too late - maybe you remember next time.

Messing with partitions is completely safe. (didn't expect that did you ) It is completely safe if you image the partitions or whole disks before you start. Otherwise it is a recipe for disaster, especially if you don't know what you are doing. The tools that allow you to make these images are fairly numerous, those worth mentioning are Clonezilla - http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php - Qt4-fsarchiver - http://qt4-fsarchiver.sourceforge.net/ - and Redobackup - http://redobackup.org/ - there are others. Obtain and learn to use one of these tools and this will never happen again - I guarantee it.

NB. Of course there is one simple answer to all this, just get hold of your Mint installation disk, bung it in and start over from scratch.

[usbtux]

http://youtu.be/UuL1NkXI7FQ how to setup mint using gparted

http://youtu.be/kBrRL6iG0NM using the installer (ubiquity) after setting up your partitions. Or installing over an existing install partitions.

How to dualboot Windows and Linux using a simple install. This is a simple standard install. http://youtu.be/lzXZpEWTApc

How to dualboot Windows and Linux using a manual install This is manual install. http://youtu.be/GlEVQqFtcuM

[usbtux]

... or better still, boot from a linux based recovery cd such as parted magic http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=down ... R9yD9231pg which has gparted on it. ...Clonezilla - http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php - Q

Clonzilla in the Parted Magic ISO

[McAwesome]

Sorry for being so vague, I'm obviously very new to this. Thanks for the help! I WAS able to install mint, and am very happy now with it. The only partition existing is the one I'm using for Linux, so it is mounted. I think I might still being vague, but unless there is some cd or something that I can run to fix this, I think I'm stuck. Although, I'm planing on getting another computer soon anyway, and don't plan on selling this one. I think I will just get used to mint, thanks again!

[Pierre]

sudo fdisk -l

can you post the output, of that command, anyway?.