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Linux Mint Missing Partition & Grub

sorceror7374

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Posted September 18, 2012 at 8:57PM

Running Mint KDE on a separate physical hard drive from the problem drive. I recently emptied off a partition in order to delete it and combine it with other empty drive space to create one partition. The KDE partition manager didn't work so I booted into a live version of Parted Magic which wouldn't do the job either. I decided to start the installation process with another distro just to finish the partitioning and then back out before installing it. Mint would no longer see the partition at all much less any empty space. I returned to the installation process and went ahead with installing the distro on a new partition on the same physical drive as Mint as well as recreating the original intended partition on the storage drive. After the installation the reboot wouldn't happen as the grub seems to have been lost which I find strange as this has never happened to me when doing this before. I managed to find a boot disc containing Super Grub 2 on it which allowed me to get back into Mint to use the PC. KDE Partition Manager gives me a 'no valid partition table was found on this device' message when I select the storage drive leaving me with 145GB of inaccessible drive space. As the PC is on pretty much 24/7 I can get away with the boot disc for the time being, but is there anything I can do to finally utilize the rest of the storage drive or is a reinstallation of Mint KDE required to fix all problems? Sorceror Level 1

Posts: 17 Joined: Sun Aug 28, 2011 10:56 am

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LastChip

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Posted September 19, 2012 at 12:48AM

To be honest, I'm struggling to fully understand yoour post. It was certainly a mistake to attempt a partial install and I suspect that's what's screwed up your hard drives partition table.

If you open up a terminal and type:

sudo fdisk -l

then hit enter, what output do you get?

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scotty

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Posted September 19, 2012 at 12:40PM

You can only combine partitions if they are contiguous (i.e. next to each other). You may need to move partitions to achieve this.

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sorceror7374

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Posted September 19, 2012 at 8:14PM

LastChip,

You're right, it was probably a mistake, but it was a last ditch effort as I couldn't seem to get any partition manager to work for me. Terminal output below:

Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders, total 125045424 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000b0d6b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 78127047 39062500 83 Linux /dev/sda2 117092350 125044735 3976193 5 Extended /dev/sda3 78127104 117090303 19481600 83 Linux /dev/sda5 117092352 125044735 3976192 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order fdisk: unable to seek on /dev/sdb: Invalid argument

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LastChip

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Posted September 19, 2012 at 10:41PM

I was afraid that might happen. Three more questions - is there any data on /sdb that you need to recover, am I right in thinking the problem partition does not have Mint on it and have you tried a bootable CD version of gparted? You can find it here.

Generally, I find if anything can fix partition problems, gparted is one of the better ones.

Frankly, given it only takes about 20 minutes to install Mint from scratch (depending on the computer speed), that may be the easiest option. The difficulty is, we don't know what state your aborted install left the partition table in, so it's sort of clutching at straws attempting to fix it.

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