Hello hello,

My girlfriend wants to give Ubuntu a try on her laptop, but doesn't want to get rid of her windows install so I used partition magic to shrink her ntfs partition and create an ext3 partition and a linux swap partition. I put the Ubuntu 8.10 install cd into the drive and booted into it but when I get to the partitioning section before the install it doesn't see my partitons. It only sees the drive in it's entirety and intends to repartition the entire drive, even under manual partitioning. It doesn't even see the windows partition or give the option to shrink it.

My guess is it's not detecting the hard drive properly, any ideas on what I can do?

I have an old BIOS and at the beginning of the install Ubuntu told me that my BIOS was older than it supported. Further into the install Ubuntu kept detecting my 3 hard drives as SATA instead of IDE. It also confused my two IDE controllers and ended up putting the SATA drives in a different order than the IDE drives. After several tries in outguessing the Ubuntu drive naming scheme I solved the problem by installing Debian instead.

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Steve Stites

Haha, after reading several posts in various forums, I've decided to agree with you. I'm going to give gentoo a try first and see how that goes. Thanks for the response.

IMHO, it is better to leave empty unpartitioned space before installing rather than creating a swap and ext3 partition first.

Most distro's have a "advanced" or "manual" partitioning option during installation. Doing so allows you to partition the empty space using gparted during the installation.

Exad, one cause of the Ubuntu installer failing to see your existing partitions is if the HDD's partition table is corrupt. It is possible to be able to boot into Windows just fine and yet have a slightly corrupted partition table that Ubuntu refuses to work with. I think it would be good to at least check if that might be your situation, so how about booting your Ubuntu Live CD, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and do:
And please post the output.