I've been using Ubuntu for the last few years and I wanted to try another distro. The problem is I can't install any distro. Ive tried Fedora, Antergos and Manjaro today and all of them have the same problem in installation which is partition. I'm not dual booting so I let the installer do it's thing the first time and it says it cannot create partition. I also tried doing it manually and there's still no success.

If it helps in the Antergos it said sgdisk -clear-dev-sda failed read error 5 which I found out to be and I/O problem.


Is there anything else I can do?


Also, I successfully installed Manjaro in one of my external hdd partitions but after rebootingy computer cannot detect it.

Need help please. Thanks

Are you using the option to Erase Disk and install so that you overwrite Ubuntu with the new OS? You could post some drive/partition informations using fdisk -l command. If you installed Manjaro to an external drive, where did you install the bootloader? To that partition? To the MBR of the external? MBR of the internal?

Try booting with a live CD. Run:and see if you get I/O errors. If you do, there's something wrong with the drive.

The partition you are installing to needs to be empty.
Use Gparted to remove all data from the partition.
Re-format the partition (e.g. to ext4).

You may even delete the partition.

With Debian, creating a partition and installing the OS on the HDD is all done on the install wizard.

Partitions do not have to be empty. They just need to be reformatted.

Welcome to LQ! Great to hear that you have been using Linux for several years! Now you are entering the CLI world of partitions Take some time to (web) research some of the concepts in post #2. I suspect you doNOT want to erase your Ubuntu! I'd guess your disk isn't "full" (df), so you could carefully shrink your "partition", so other installs could then find "unallocated disk" space (vs free "filesystem" space).

One other idea, from way out in left-field, is VirtualBox. It allows you to instantly create (&delete) whole "sub-PCs" on your desktop! There's even .VirtualDiskImage .vdi *files* (@osboxes.org) that have various distros already installed &ready2run: an amazing "virtual world" if you've never played in it! This might be a way to try a dozen other distros, in minutes, as fast as you can download .vdi (or uninstalled .iso)

Yes, post precise details, so all the wonderful LQers can happily help you. Best wishes! See http://TermBin.com Research GRUB for the external. Make Linux UserFriendly Again