Ubuntu not compatible with Partion Magic

Asked by JohnDCarter

I have installed WinXP and Ubuntu 6.06 five times but cannot find a way of getting Partition Magic to work. Each time I installed WinXP first then used PM to partition the disk or let Ubuntu do it. It just seems to be that even if I select the manual option in Parted Ububtu does its own thing with partitions. So to save me wasting any more time can you tell me if PM is compatible with Ubuntu or not?

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Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz) said :
#1

I think the best way in order to install Ubuntu is to allocate some disk space with PartitionMagic without formatting it. Ubuntu installer will manage it correctly.
See also https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation for further help.

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JohnDCarter (john-carter) said :
#2

I did do as you suggest and everyting works well in that both Ubuntu and WinXP will boot up and operate. The problem is that PM is unable to recognise any partition and therefore cannot be used to make further adjustments to the NTFS partitions (c:\ and d:\).

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Skobelev Max (ss145) said :
#3

I think you have problems with your partition table. Try to recover it by gpart or TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org). Backup important files!!!

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JohnDCarter (john-carter) said :
#4

I agree that there are problems but the question is why. There is little doubt that Ubuntu created a situation where LBA and CHS valus no longer match - and Ubuntu does not seem to care about this. PM offered to correct some of these problems but gave up with a message saying that a Logical partition begins more than one head away from Extended partition. PM tried to fix this as well but finally gave up with Error #117: Partition drive letter cannot be identified. As I said before Ubuntu is happy with this situation. Do you expect gpart or TestDisk to fix problems with paritioning in a Windows environment?

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Luca Falavigna (dktrkranz) said :
#5

I noticed similar issues when I used PM some times ago, but neither Windows or GNU/Linux suffered from these warnings. You could freely ignore them, unless you have to edit your partition table.

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JohnDCarter (john-carter) said :
#6

The point at issue is that PM is apparently useless. Should I consider using the Linux tools (GPart or Testdisk) to adjust my partitions? Can I be assured that these tools will still allow WinXP to work?
It also appears that the answer to my original question is that Ubuntu and PM are NOT compatible. If so we should tell the world.

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magilus (magilus) said :
#7

It's a bug in PM. All other partition tools work fine.

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