dual boot with windows 7

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#1

I have been trying to set up a dual boot with windows 7 but have not been able to make it work. This is on an hp laptop.

When every I enter the suse setup it lets me gives me a notification saying that it cannot read the partition table to and because of this I cannot add or remove partitions, only format current ones. After using parted magic I found that with the oem install partition and other windows 7 partitions that I had used up all 4 partitions available. To remedy this I backed up the restore partition and deleted to make an open slot.

After this the suse install still complained about not being able to read the partition table so I tried to make the partitions in parted magic. I set up an extended partition with a swap and 2 ext partition, but after doing so windows would not boot and went into a restart cycle. I disabled the windows automatic restart on error and I got a blue screen saying that I should scan disk F. F never existed before so I figured it was the new partitions. I did it anyway from the windows 7 tools and it told me it could not run a scan on drive F. I deleted the partition using parted magic and then windows was able to start normally.

I guess I’m just running out of things to try here without formatting the whole drive and starting over. Any ideas?

#2

Can you boot from Parted magic and

fdisk -l

in a terminal, and post the output.

#3

yes here is what fdisk shows me:


Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x762fb085

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1           1         992+  42  SFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2               1          26      203776   42  SFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3   *          26       47649   382532608   42  SFS
#4

You may have to first convert your dynamic partitions to standard NTFS.

#5

My last post assumes you are not running SFS which is a bit obsolete. If you are let us know.

fdisk apparently detects windows dynamic disks as SFS. You will want basic NTFS here.

Also can you tell us what each partition is used for.

#6

ya it is ntfs and the disks are dynamic. From what I have read the only way to convert them to basic I need to format them… I am not sure what all three are but last one is the C drive and the second one I believe is the system partition that windows set up. I am not sure what the first one is, I do not see it in Windows either.

#7

From what I have read the only way to convert them to basic I need to format them…

The following is for XP but a bit of searching should get an answer for win7.How To Convert to Basic and Dynamic Disks in Windows XP Professional

#8

From what I have read the only way to convert them to basic I need to format them…

This does appear to be the case, I have not worked with windows dynamic disks, I think your best option may be backup your data and reinstall.
However that doesn’t stop you trying (with that backup of course)
And someone may yet have suggestions to add.

#9

From what I have read the only way to convert them to basic I need to format them…

test disk on Parted magic. Have a read here

How to non-destructively convert dynamic disks to basic disks « My PKB

#10

Thank you guys for all the help. Hopefully I will get this running soon

#11

awesome help guys changed the disks to basic using the guide and suse installed with no problems at all

#12

Nice to see it’s working,Thanks for posting the results.

#13

Indeed! A quick google search for partition ID 0x42 shows that it is used for:

  • Linux swap (sharing disk with DRDOS)
  • SFS (Secure Filesystem)
  • Windows 2000 dynamic extended partition marker

Partition types: List of partition identifiers for PCs