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Old 05-05-2011, 08:00 PM   #1
brb602
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Exclamation Gparted will not partition my hardrive


I am trying to get linux puppy to boot from my hard drive but in order to do that i have to partition my hard drive. My hard drive is 20GB and currently has a windows 98 OS. I dont want the windows 98 OS to even be on the computer anymore. I am trying to partition my hard drive with gparted. My problem is everything is grayed out and it says i need to unmount my hard drive. When i click unmount, it says "could not unmount /dev/sda1" then under that it says "unmount:can't unmount /initrd/mnt/dev_save: device or resource is busy."
 
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Old 05-05-2011, 08:21 PM   #2
TobiSGD
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Easiest way to get totally rid of any partition on the disk:
Code:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
After that restart the system and partition it the way you want.

Warning, backup your data first, this action will delete your partition table !!! Do not do this on a production system if you don't know exactly what you are doing!!!
 
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Old 05-05-2011, 08:22 PM   #3
andrewthomas
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I assume that you are using a gparted liveCD, no?
 
Old 05-05-2011, 09:53 PM   #4
Mr. Bill
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Looks like you've run Puppy before and saved the session to the HDD. In that case, Puppy won't unmount it's boot drive or remove the Windows partition. If the aforementioned instruction doesn't work, you should be able to boot into Windows and remove the pup files, thus forcing Puppy to boot from CD only. (Ran into that snag myself, once.)

Hope this helps

Last edited by Mr. Bill; 05-05-2011 at 09:56 PM.
 
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Old 05-06-2011, 12:05 AM   #5
expat
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Run puppy in ram only and you should have no more trouble. But make sure you back up anything you might want first before playing with gparted.
 
Old 05-06-2011, 12:42 AM   #6
Breeze
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The partition in use can't be changed.
Why not try Gparted Live CD?
 
Old 05-06-2011, 06:04 AM   #7
masterclassic
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I'd like to add my own experience too.

Busy partition in GParted means usually mounted. GParted doesn't modify any mounted partition.
This is typical in the case of GParted running from a Linux installation and trying to modify some of the partitions that this installation mounts.
The easiest way to go in this case is to use the GParted livecd, that runs exclusively from the cd on the RAM. It doesn't mount any partition by default (altough it is possible to manually mount a partition from the terminal).
You need to download the ISO file from the GParted site and burn in in an empty CDR or CDRW (as ISO image, *not* as data cd).

GParted can easily delete any old partition on the hard drive.
Be careful to select the right hard drive, in case you have more than one on the system (it even detects external USB/Firewire drives connected to the system). And, of course, be sure that you have backup of any important files on the drive before proceeding!
 
Old 05-06-2011, 04:14 PM   #8
jake3988
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That's correct. Make sure that your partition is unmounted before you proceed! Umount the partition and then run gparted again.

Mount too will check to see if the partition is busy in its own way as well. (You can not currently be in that directory in a term/console, you can't be accessing any files from that partition, etc)
 
Old 05-06-2011, 04:34 PM   #9
brb602
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yes i am running it off the live cd. thanks a ton for all the suggestions ill try them and see if they work
 
Old 05-06-2011, 04:37 PM   #10
brb602
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TobiSGD, where do you type that code at?
 
Old 05-06-2011, 10:04 PM   #11
Mr. Bill
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Quote:
Originally Posted by brb602 View Post
TobiSGD, where do you type that code at?
That would be in the terminal, a.k.a. "shell".

Last edited by Mr. Bill; 05-06-2011 at 10:06 PM.
 
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Old 05-07-2011, 12:01 AM   #12
brb602
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Ok cool I did it! By deleting my saved files from puppy on the windows 98 OS i was able to get the partitions going. (thanks mr. Bill) I partitioned my hard drive and got the software dual booting with 98 the OS... But then I deleted the partition that had the 98 OS running on it cause I wanted to get rid of it. I have a new problem: now the computer won't boot my puppy OS... Oops... I feel really stupid now cause I had the software installed but it won't boot up now. I can ofc boot off the live cd but my problem of getting the OS to boot off the hard drive still remains. Any suggestions?

Last edited by brb602; 05-07-2011 at 12:09 AM.
 
Old 05-07-2011, 09:14 AM   #13
yancek
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Not sure what you are saying in your last post.
Did you install Puppy to its own partition? Were you then able to boot Puppy on the hard drive? Were you also able to boot windows 98?
You then deleted windows 98 and now cannot boot from the hard drive?
When you say you can boot off the CD, does that mean you are booting the Live CD with Puppy? or are you able to boot the installed version by using the Live CD? or do you know?
 
Old 05-07-2011, 10:03 AM   #14
Mr. Bill
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Looks like you may have wiped the bootloader. When you boot from CD, can you mount the Puppy partition and view the Puppy installation? If so, then try re-installing Grub to the MBR.
 
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Old 05-07-2011, 11:13 AM   #15
brb602
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EVERYTHING WORKS!!!!!!!!!! I managed to figure out i had the boot flags in the wrong place. I have puppy running off the hard drive and windows 98 is no longer on my computer. One last question. Is there any way to make my computer load puppy without making me select it on the keyboard durring bootup and pressing enter?
 
  


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