Some weeks back I had Win XP and Ubuntu 12.04 running pretty good on a 500gig drive.....until i foolhardily attempted to allocate an extra 50gig of unallocated space on the drive to Windows as I wanted to run further distro's in virtual drives and Windows was using most of the 137gig originally granted to it when installed couple of years back.

Basically, I broke the file table ending up with everything unmounted. Try as I might Grub went down the pan including Windows MBR - all aparrently unretrievable.

Sorry so long - but the upshot is that having concluded that all was lost I decided that it was time to move on as I had most of my Windows stuff backed up.

First off, I attempted to reinstal Ubuntu but the disk kept failing as soon as it got to the auto partion section and the manual option seemingly unresponsive. So after half a dozen attempts I figured it was time to try Mint16 that I got with a Linux mag.......this also fails as it seems incapable of finding the file table.

Could it be the drive is knackered from all the partitioning I attempted? As I thought the distro disks should do any hard drive formatting automatically when instructed.

Living in hope some of you guys are a lot smarter than me!!!

Thanks Pozzouk.

Pozzouk,

Just a thought..... You might throw that Ubuntu disk back in, and rather than install, choose the option to run from live CD. Once it has booted up, run the gparted tool in Ubuntu, and you can delete/create/format the drive as you see fit. It will also provide you disk health information and so on if you have bad sectors, etc...

HTH

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Trying Ubuntu 12.04 from the installation medium seems like a good idea as it will be supported until April, 2017. Mint 16 is no longer supported so best to put that disk away somewhere.

Cheers Guy's

I have got the Ubuntu disc running in live mode & found gparted. Unfortunately after the best part of a ten minute search gparted has announced that it has found no devices?!?!

Can that be right???

Try booting again and checking the BIOS by hitting whatever key shows on your initial boot screen to enter setup. Check to see if your drive(s) are recognized there to start. If so, boot it up and try running: sudo fdisk -l(Lower Case Letter L in the command) and post the output.

When you tried to install earlier, did you use the manual (Something Else) option and did you see any drive/partitions on those screens? I'm not sure what you mean by the manual option being unresponsive?

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Hello

I've been into the bios and it would appear that the drive is at least listed showing that the Western Digital sata 500 is there. So put Ubunto back In and typed in the sudo fdisk -l command and there seems to be no response whatsoever......maybe I have done something wrong?

Are there any other commands that might throw light on the issue???

Thanks as always.

As for my attempts to fully install Ubuntu - when I went for the auto create partitions yesterday nothing happened so tried the manual set up and struggled to get a successful response but to be fair I was not that certain as to the parameters required to get it rolling.......sorry to be vague.
I had a few messages such as:

The ext4 file system creation in partition #1of SCSl1(000)(sda) failed

The creation of swap space in partition #5 of SCSl1 (0,0,0)(sda) failed

Input/output error during read on /dev/sda

Hence I tried the Mint option that seemed to give no option at the point of partitioning at all.

Thanks for following this along
Pozzouk.

If you can't get any output when entering the fdisk command I suggested from a terminal in Ubuntu, I really don't know what the problem could be, especially if the drive is recognized in the BIOS. Not sure what you tried to get the errors from your last post. You might take a look at the link below which is a pretty good tutorial for installing 14.04, should be pretty similar for 12.04 as I recall. It also has some information on and a link to a tutorial on partitioning.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/u...all-guide.html

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Hi yancek

I have had a good look through your suggested Link & the subject is a little clearer......like there are areas that i need to go over again to be sure! All obvious when you know how i guess. For the moment i am in the process of downloading the 32 bit edition of 14.04 having found that the 64 bit edition was obviously wrong, bringing up an endless list of errors but i thought it worth a go.

Pozzouk.