Hello folks,

I was trying to install arch on a computer that was previously running Windows 8, only to be unable to open cfdisk because it printed some message about a corrupted partition table and wouldn't open.

So I ran a gparted live disk , created a new partition table, and several new partitions but I still keep getting an error no matter what I do.

"Invalid partition table - recursive partition on /dev/sdb"

I tried looking around, but I couldn't find a solution anywhere.

I tried creating new partition tables several times, and leaving the disk unallocated or unformatted but the same error keeps appearing over and over.

Any help? I am really lost here ...
The disk is a 1 month old Corsair 120GB GS SSD

So if you have no (important) data you can try erase the beginning of the disk (with dd) and create partition table again.

Thank you for your answer.

I already deleted everything several times via gparted so no, I don't have any important data.

How would I go about deleting the beginning of the disk via dd on a debian live root terminal? The disk is /dev/sda

Thanks again

see here: http://blog.bravi.org/?p=856#more-856

2 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the link.

Using DD was indeed the solution.

In my case the MBR turned out to be the problem, in case this happens to anybody else, I tried several commands , but this was the one that did the trick:
I can finally go back to installing Arch now

Thanks again!

1 members found this post helpful.

I had the same problem coming from windows to Arch. This fixed me as well thanks for posting the solution!