<Solved> Mint installer can’t see partitions

[TheVorteX]

Hi all! Sorry for the long post.

I am trying to install Mint 13 Cinnamon x64 on my ThinkPad T520 Laptop alongside Windows 7 x64. This laptop has 2 different hard drives. The boot drive is an 80GB Intel mSATA SSD which has Windows 7 on it. The second hard drive is a 320GB Western Digital SATA drive used for extra storage. Both drives are encrypted using Bitlocker.

I started off by suspending Bitlocker (so I could change the boot process) and I made 50GB of unallocated space available on my secondary SATA drive for Mint. When I booted into the live CD and started the install process I picked the manual partitioning option. The installer saw my 2 partitions on my SSD, the 100mb boot partition and the rest was an unknown partition which is fine since it’s encrypted. However it didn’t see anything on my 320GB SATA drive. It showed the whole drive as free space which was not the case.

I figured that maybe the installer didn’t know any better since it was encrypted data so I decrypted the 320GB HDD and tried installing Mint again. Even with the drive decrypted, the installer only sees the 320GB HDD as free space which is a problem. Even GParted only sees the drive as free space.

Does anyone know why the installer and GParted only sees my HDD as free space? It can see all the partitions on my SSD just fine, including Windows 7 which is encrypted. Both drives use the MBR partition style and are simple disks (according to computer management in Windows)

edit:
SOLVED!
See my next post for the fix.

[TheVorteX]

Found out what the problem is after some more Google searching. Apparently there was a leftover GPT partition signature while the actual partitions were MBR. Others can check for this by typing in the terminal "parted /dev/sdX print". Replace sdX with the actual drive. Here was the output that I got:

mint mint # parted /dev/sda print
Warning: /dev/sda contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table.
However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should.
Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT
partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an
msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table?

After this I installed gdisk which includes the fixparts command by typing "apt-get install gdisk". After this installed I typed "fixparts /dev/sda" (replace sda with your hard drive) and fixparts immidiately came up with this:

mint mint # fixparts /dev/sda
FixParts 0.8.1

Loading MBR data from /dev/sda

NOTICE: GPT signatures detected on the disk, but no 0xEE protective partition!
The GPT signatures are probably left over from a previous partition table.
Do you want to delete them (if you answer 'Y', this will happen
immediately)? (Y/N): Y
Erasing GPT data!

I typed q to quit and now the installer and GParted see my partitions fine . Hope this post helps someone else.


I fixed this issue with help from this page:
http://rodsbooks.com/missing-parts/

[ahmedeering]

THANK YOU !!!
i'm a linux noob and this just saved me !!! very grateful for the quoted commands !!

[Tirnaog]

I am getting same problem trying to install Mint.
But when I run the fixparts cmd I get an error 20 result.
Cant read MBR dtat from /dev/sda/

Fixparts is version: 0.8.5

Any ideas?

[Savage001]

Just registered to post on this thread to say thankyou! I too was also getting a "dev/sdb contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table?"

Thankyou TheVorteX, your information greatly helped.

Savage

[molram]

Thank you very much!! This stuff was my solution.

I had problems trying to install the Linux Mint 16 with EFI. And I wanted to install normal, but I was not able to see the partitions. And was exactly this problem and the solution also!

[Justin83]

Hello folks, I'm new to the forums but I've recently reformatted my computer and got Windows 8.1 installed without a hitch and made a 20 gig seperated partition for Mint but when I start the install and some procedures to troubleshoot I got the above messages.

Having the same issue and when I tried the command above I go this message in the terminal command line:
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Is there something I am doing wrong or not doing, still kinda new to mint but I love its simplicity and speed, its nice as a 2nd OS with Windows 8.

Thanks in advance.
Justin

[Oscar799]

Justin83
Please start a new thread with your question
Tacking it onto the end of a two and a half year old solved thread probably won't get you an answer