Lost my guru, ran out of HD space, erased too much, need to reinstall.

Downloaded ISO, burned disk, tested disc, tried to install, but it fails to recognize old partitions in the prepare space part.

Hardware is a 4-system(partition) SSD in RAID 0, with all the bootable systems,
and a 4-partition HD in RAID 0 (one disk failing) for data only.

How to I get it to recognize a particular partition on the SSD RAID 0 to install over?

AND can it reinstall the system software and leave the other stuff as it was installed over 2 years?

Thanks a million.

-- Stymied

perhaps you should mention what filesystem is not recognized, what linux is on .iso.
is it software or hardware raid?
don't forget to make a backup first.

[Both] the SSD [and the HD] RAID 0 arrays are hardware.

Stripe 1 and 2 partitions are ntfs (Windows systems - XP 64-bit and 32-bit) [a problem for a later time]

Stripe 5 has a moribund Karmic Koala - cannot tell file system: fstab just says "/dev/mapper/isw_cijjadcefb_Stripe5 /media/karmic auto defaults 0 2" I think ext How can I get karmic to tell me?

Stripe 6 is the Lucid Lynx to be replaced is xfs

But the ISO installer says no systems present.

ISO is ubuntu-10.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso

er, what do you mean by 'erased too much'?
perhaps you should do fsck before trying reinstall.

I was trying to free up space (rapidly running out of it). I deleted what I guessed (bad choice) to be unneeded, including something that sounded like a Windows download helper. Anyway, I wound up unable to boot, and unable to find any effective root.

I have been a user (=not very knowledgeable).

What is fsck? Can it be done it the system refuses to recognize me as having root authority?

I can after a LOT of fouteling around, get the lynx to open a small text window (like monitor) in the upper left, showing a prompt, letting me do ls, but not sudo anything. I have no idea how to go further or get back to the GUI I am a little more familiar with.

Similarly, I may be unable to follow your backup suggestion for lack of root authority.

if you deleted stuff as ordinary user, not root, then system shouldn't need reinstall ( I think).
fsck (filesystemcheck) is a command for checking and repairing filesystems. it is useful if computer wasn't shutdown properly and filesystems haven't been unmounted 'cleanly'. I'm not sure it would help in your case, though.

that lynx was running inside Gnome/KDE terminal? I assume you managed to get it running from raid, not livecd.
I would start the system from GRUB so that it boots in text only mode. than check the directories and files, and free space (df).
read the log files in /var and look for errors.


you could do backup from livecd. afaik, every livecd gives you root authority.

OK. So if I boot the liveCD, I have root authority, but over what? ALL linux partitions in GRUB2? How do I specify which I want to work on?

For example, how do I recreate a user with root authority on a particular partition? Or check that it would boot normally to the GUI?

I think you mix up 'root authority' with mounting.
true, sometimes only root can mount partitions. but its two different things.

here is how you specify. use gparted or similar to find physical partition name: sda1, sdb3.. or uuid (uuid is some sort of unique partition serial number, very handy, note down all uuids).
then mount it somewhere (make a temporary dir as mountpoint)


yes, root from livecd can access all partitions. it should also be able to read and write files unless you used some exotic filesystem not supported by livecd.

not sure about your other questions; check booting in GUI by trying..

another thing worth checking is that hardware RAID. I think you should enter BIOS for it and check there if everything is all right. (not sure, never used any kind of RAID)