Problem with disk partition table when trying to install Mint 17
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I just did some test installs on a laptop I could trash. I converted it to gpt and added enough partitions to fill the disk, then installed Mint17 Cinnamon (not XFCE). Went fine, with no warnings like you got. Regardless of whether I had UEFI boot enabled in the BIOS or not. Can't explain what the difference is.
No need to do anything with gparted - all you need can be done from the "Installation type" dialog in the installer. Select "something else", and you'll get a list of your partitions. Highlight one (say the Slack root, /dev/sda1) and then click "Change .." button on the left below the list.
Leave the size alone and click the "Use as:" drop-down so you can select a filesystem - say ext4. That will add another dropdown for "Mount Point:" - select "/" for the root and also tick the "Format the partition" box, and hit "OK".
Now select the swap partition and hit the "-" button to delete it. After the rescan of the disk you'll have some free space there. Highlight that and hit the "+" button to add a partition. Change the space - I made it 100 Meg, and hit the "use as:" droplist to select "Reserved BIOS boot area". Click "OK".
Select the free space, hit "+", make it swap and click "OK".
Hit "Install Now" and see what happens. (leave the bootloader as /dev/sda).
Is there still data on slack?
If not just choose to use the entire disk which will erase & partition automatically.
In other words you don't have to manually partition.
If you do manually partition drive set the boot flag to /.
Syg00; Thanks for your reply. What you suggest is more or less what I did, except that I did not delete the swap partition. There was some free space before the first partition so I tried to make this BIOS partition there, but it gave an error every time. It is strange that I am having all this trouble with GPT which did not occur on your test system. I have decided that I shall buy a 1TB external disk and copy all my data there before taking any risks. This GPT thing is making a mess of my machine, which has anyway been performing very badly recently, so I want to get rid of GPT and go back to legacy system, and also completely reformat the disk. I shall therefore delete the partition table, and make a new one which is not GPT, create the 3 partitions I want and format them. Then I will try the Mint installer one last time, and if that still does not work I shall give up and install Slackware 14.1 which I know will work. Finally I shall copy all of the data from the external disk back to my home partition.
EDDY1; thanks for your input. I have nearly a TB of data in /home which I need to keep. Anyway I insist on a separate /home partition so I can keep all data intact when upgrading or changing OS, so I have to use the manual installation.
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