[SOLVED ...sort of] Cfdisk " Bad primary partition 0", but I can mount it all on a live linux
 

I was trying to install debian stable via USB/unetbootin on my desktop, replacing my previous install (switching from i686 to amd64, which seems to be more appropriate for the intel core 2 duo), without changing the partitions, keeping my stuff on the home partition, formatting only swap and root.

Everything went fine during the install, but on the first boot I got the message that "/boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod" wasn't found, leaving me on the grub command prompt. I'm not sure if it's grub 1 or 2 (whatever is Debian stable's).

This file is however at the root of the grub folder, not on the subdirectory i386-pc, which doesn't even exist.

I'm not sure if that's profoundly relevant right now because while trying to recover from that I had found instructions along the lines of:

This is exactly* how I did it, after mounting sda1, as instructed.

* Well, at least I hope so. I do recall paying attention to pointing to /media/sda1 and to just /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1; but now I wonder if I used the "=" instead of just a space...


But after booting, I simply had no output at all. After the "BIOS" part, it was almost as if the monitor was disconnected from the PC; the monitor's own OSD popped up on the corner and nothing would show up. I think the HDD led wasn't lighting up as well, and it did respond to control+alt+del, from which I booted to parted magic again, and here I am while I'm searching for possible solutions.


For what I've been reading (not much yet) it seems it may be something wrong with the partition table. But I'm not at all sure it is the case since I can mount the partitions with no error message or anything, it all seems to be normal except for cfdisk, which will refuse to start with this warning (bad primary partition 0). Parted -l and fdisk -l also list the partitions normally, with no warnings. I'm not sure they'd would warn of anything, anyway, I'd just guess there would be something weird.

I'm guessing the grub-install caused it by installing on the wrong place or something, possibly I did something wrong and/or I have/had an unusual partition setup.


Here it is:

I don't know why there's no 3 and 4. But there's no "missing space"/missing partitions, it's as if there was nothing wrong but skipped numbers for some reason. Hopefully they're just arbitrary labels or that's just because sda5 and 6 are within the extended partition sda2.

"Partition Table: msdos"? Just now I noticed it. It didn't have DOS or windows for a few years, since I started using it, but it did have windows previously, but never both linux and windows. I'm going to keep searching for more clues on google.

Thanks in advance for any help here. Sorry for the long post, I thought of posting everything that I thought could be relevant but I'm a bit clueless.




Update1:

At least I think don't have "overlapping partitions", which doesn't exactly surprises me, even though it's relieving anyway:



Update 2:
I think this may have happened:

I guess it even happened once before with me. Indeed booting the USB I can access a "grub rescue" prompt. From there the only command I could guess was "ls" and the result was:

And now I recall having read something about Debian's (at least the stable release) net-install not being fully ext4-capable...

I'll see if I can recover with this chroot method, even though I'm not that hopeful that it will make any difference. If it doesn't work, I guess I'll try to install again with "hd-media" instead of netinstall...

After a brief search, I have to ask if you have taken a look here ?

Thanks, but I think I did see it, I remember seen a blog with instructions about reinstalling grub, from a link in some forum, and this blog had this "animated pop-up" effect.


I "solved" it by reinstalling, not without some bumps still. First I tried using hd-media on unetbootin, but it wouldn't work, complaining that it couldn't read the CD ROM drive. Then I thought I'd try netinst again, since it had at least finished the installation, with the grub error that the Debian page warns. Funnily enough, this netinst behaved like hd-media*, looking for ISOs on the HD, and finding a netinst I've downloaded earlier. I succeeded installing from that with the relatively minor annoyance that I couldn't set to use my former home partition again, as it was the source for the ISO (I suppose it's because of that). Also, unexpectedly, the install didn't show up with the "default" offer to install GRUB on the MBR, but instead it gave me manual options, as the Debian's site warning says if it would do if I had refused the default offer... weird, perhaps that was a bug-fix. Now I just need to edit fstab and perhaps some other configuration trickery to have the old /home partition again.

I'll mark as "solved" anyway, even though it's not quite "reference" solved. There should be a "[SOLVED ...sort of]" mark. I even still have the same cfdisk warning/failure, but it seems the system will be usable, at least for the rest of the life of this old HDD.



* I guess that, without manually removing the files from the pendrive, there may be remains from hd-media that are not overwritten or deleted by unetbootin, and change the behavior of what is installed later. Or maybe it was just a wrong impression, and netinstall always has this behavior.

Definitely Grub2. The entry in grub.cfg may have been pointing to the wrong location but I guess that's a moot point now.

That's the wrong command because you have a separate boot directory to which you should be pointing not the --root-directory.

There is nothing wrong or unusual with the partitions. Number 1 is a primary boot partition and number 2 is primary as Extended. 5 and 6 are logical partitions within 2, the Extended partition. On Linux, logical partitions start with 5. I'm not familiar with Debian so don't have any suggestions. Hope the above information is useful.

Actually I've fixed it "twice" already, I had to reinstall once again when I noticed that Debian stable was too old for my taste (and couldn't be smoothly upgraded to "testing"), and the install had the same bug of installing GRUB on the pendrive, despite of me manually setting it to install at /dev/sda.

I could however boot to the HDD install from the pendrive's grub, and from there I did pretty much the "grub install" line mentioned before, only followed by it's repetition with a "--recheck" option (just mindlessly doing what I've read on some ubuntu page, didn't seem it could possibly be bad), and then "update-grub".



I guess it may the case when you have an actual separate /boot partition, which isn't that uncommon. The "numberless"/"partitionless" command is intended to install grub at the MBR, not at any given partition; the installer even mentions that installing at a partition "probably isn't what you want to do", or something like that. Or at least that's what I got/recall from what I've read so far. In any case, I did the command without pointing to a /boot folder (or partition) and it worked.



Thanks. At least now I know that's most likely not linked with cfdisk's message.