I have a PC with a single HDD and multiple partitions as follows:
A FAT32 - Special partition for recovery (Windows kit provided by manufacturer)
NTFS - C: win partition for primary Win
NTFS - D: win partition for other Win OS
These 3 are primary partitions.
An extended partition with NTFS E and the rest of HDD the default partitions of openSUSE 11.3 (/ , /home)
All the OSs worked perfectly until I reinstalled the D: Windows OS. During the Win install the machine is restarting and normally continues to finish the setup. In my case after restart the following message appeared: Invalid partition table.
I think that by reinstalling linux I will get access to the C and E partitions too but I need to reinstall win on D too. How can I make this possible.
The problem is that Windows cannot handle any other partitions than FAT and NTFS. I would try this:
Download a live cd of a partitioning tool like gparted. With this tool you hide any other partition than the one which should be used by windows. Reinstall windows. Unhide the other partitions and reinstall GRUB. Make image backups of your windows installations.
Another way to get rid of that problem would be to install the windows OSs into a VM.
hide a partition means that it is there but cannot be seen by the booting OS. So the windows installing process doesn’t see that there are Linux partitions and doesn’t take care of them.
I can’t say why this is happening but it might be kinda like this:
Maybe the win D: OS is vista or win7, in which case the NTFS version is not all that Linux friendly, and maybe that’s the genesis of the error message.
Whatever, if you’re prepared top blow off the existing D: and Linux drives, I would recommend this:
Boot into and primary OS on C: drive. Delete all partitions after the primary win drive C: . Then create an extended partition in the empty space. Then create an NTFS partition in part of the extended partition. Then install windows on that new part. Then install Linux in the empty space at the end of the new extended partition.