Problems with partitioning and installing

[viking777]

I guess it depends how you installed in the first place. Did you use Mint4Win or did you do a standard install? If you did a standard install and you delete the the Mint partition then yes it will certainly interfere with your boot, you will lose both Mint and Windows. Not irreversibly, you will have to use Vistas tools or the windows command line to reinstate the windows boot loader before you got anything back. If you used Mint4Win first time around then I haven't got a clue what would happen as it is a complete unknown to me, my guess is you would be OK.

Two cd's and gparted showing your disk as entirely unallocated now that is a mystery. Do you have more than one hard disk? If so are you looking at the right one? Is your disk set up with LVM (logical volume management)? I am really clutching at straws here because I don't know the answer. I would be very reluctant to do anything to your installation until you find out why your disk is being read as unallocated. Have you tried Ctl/R from within gparted - this refreshes the devices (ie rereads them) It shouldn't be necessary but it might help.

[viking777]

As I said before, if you remove your Mint partition then you will remove the ability to boot Vista as well until you reinstall the Vista boot loader so just be sure you know how to do this before proceeding.

[Fred]

93jam wrote:

The live CD sees the drives, but the installer and gParted just say the whole thing is unallocated.

This is just plain wrong. They should all be reading the same partition table. This leads me to question how you burned the CD/DVD. Did you burn it s-l-o-w, < 8X, I burn mine at 4X max, and in a RAW mode. RAW is usually listed DAO, SAO, or TAO. Distros use very aggressive compression. Burning a good, error free live CD/DVD iso is much more difficult than other burn operations.

Fred

[viking777]

If you used this cd to install Mint 2 months ago then at that time it must have been capable of reading your partition table correctly. It is not very likely that a CD will deteriorate in 2 months - unless you have scratched it or something, even then you say that you have tried it with a Kubuntu CD and the results are the same - so the only thing that is likely to have changed in that time is the hard disk itself. Have you made any changes either from within Windows or Linux that might have cause this to occur? Any unusual software added? Even this wouldn't explain it fully because fdisk reads your hard drive correctly.

You might try chkdsk from windows or e2fsck from linux (although your drives need to be unmounted for that ie. you have to use your live cd) and see if they turn up any errors on the disk.

[viking777]

Yep, I would agree with richjack, parted magic is great to have around ( it even runs completely in ram so it ejects itself when loaded allowing you to run tests on some other cd/dvd should you wish) Another good option is the SysRec CD(http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page). TestDisk is very useful for discovering and fixing partition table errors but beware as it is extremely powerful and can just as easily destroy things as fix them if you get it wrong. If you decide to use it make sure you read their wiki first http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk.