No Operating system detected! - solved

[jones_d56]

Hi New here go easy...

Trying to install linux mint alongside xp as a dual boot on a Sony Vaio laptop....

When the mint liveCD starts i run the install,but! it doesn't see windows xp!
it says "no operating system detected!"and wants use the whole drive and format it etc!

So i then created a new partation on the drive within xp and hoped MINT would "see" another partition! NO just one large drive EMPTY drive ready to be formatted etc...

Any ideas?

Dee

[relchabb]

Hi. For your system not to see the partition, I think that you forgot to format the partition after creating it. just guessing

[Mister.T]

I believe that if you have already deleted the XP partition, you are stuffed. IE: you've lost the lot.

If you have not deleted the windows partition and it still boots from start up then try this. Run the live cd/dvd, open an app called gparted. Use this wonderful piece of software to reduce the size of the XP partition to the required size. After this operation, install mint onto the newly created free space. The installation should by default, install GRUB to SDA. After installation is complete, reboot the system and your grub bootloader should show your XP and Mint partitions.

[jones_d56]

Hi Thanks for your thoughts

First I only made another partition as LinuxMint didn't seem to see any operating system i.e XP... it wanted to format the whole disk drive for its self! so i made a second partition (FAT32) hopeing that it would see this instead... nope!

XP still works... on its NTFS partition, the second partation in FAT32 is formatted and visible in XP...

I downloaded Puppy Linux... it installs O.K...(I dont have to run the live cd anymore) as it now runs from the FAT32 drive! with a boot loader NO PROBLEMS it can access the XP NTFS partition as well from puppy!

i tried GParted in puppylinux to view the partitions... no luck it just shows 1 drive unallocated (No operating system)!

it says Invalid partition table on /dev/sda -- wrong signature 0.

I then ran Pdisk partition manager (a text based thing) it sees

sda1 - NTFS (Where XP is)
sda2 - Ext'd (Tiny area)
sda3 - Fat32 (Where Puppy is!)

Why so much hassle ? XP works ... Puppy works, but some things dont see the drives partitions!!!! arrrrr

Any thoughtss

Dee

[remoulder]

Invalid partition table on /dev/sda -- wrong signature 0

This can happen if the partition was moved or the partition table has been corrupt. There was also a bug in gparted https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=623630 though this should be fixed in newer versions. It may be possible to correct the error, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1715626 for one possible solution.

[AlbertP]

You should install Linux on an ext3, ext4 or Btrfs partition, instead of FAT32. Perhaps this causes problems?

It could also be that your harddisk or computer uses a non-standard partition table, but if Windows XP can run on it, Linux should run fine too.

[jones_d56]

Hi Thanks again for your thoughts...

I have run several free ntfs partition checkers (windows xp based) non flagged problems, but now linuxmint sees the drive containing xp and makes a nice new partition for its self... horray!

I have no idea what changed but something was altered and on install i had the option showing XP....

It seems to be installing now!

Thanks, once again

[AlbertP]

Please edit the first post and add [solved] to the title when you got it solved.

Indeed, chkdsk and other NTFS check or defragment programs can do a lot of good things Linux doesn't do by itself. When Windows has crashed somewhere in the past it often leaves a mess behind, but Windows itself does not care about that.