The Arch Linux experience thus far has been spending an hour just trying to partition the fucking disk
why doesn't Arch recognise the partitions on my disk? i created them within Arch

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The Arch Linux experience thus far has been spending an hour just trying to partition the fucking disk
why doesn't Arch recognise the partitions on my disk? i created them within Arch

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Use GDisk in Windows to convert to GPT
Clear steps to use GDisk to convert MBR disk to GPT disk:
1. run “gdisk64.exe”, or “gdisk32.exe”
2.\\.\physicaldrive#, enter “y” to confirm.
3. Type "t”
4.Type "1” or the sequence number of your system partition.
5. Type "EF00”
6. Type "w” to write the changes to the table and exit. Or type "q” and Enter to cancel the changes . To cancel all operations made by GDisk and exit GDisk, you need to type “q” again.
This article displays how to convert MBR to GPT without data loss using GDisk as well as better replacement of GDisk in Windows 10/8/7.
Triple Macbook Pro (Mac+Win+Linux)
Alright, so I begin knowing that their are many such posts out their such as this. This however, is what worked for me, and so i thought i would share. My experience was mostly trial and error and my solution came from researching other fixes. For this guide I am assuming that you know your way around your mac fairly well. Although if i have posted this in the wrong place, i apologize. But i digress... My hardware: MacbookPro8,2 The problems
Lion recovery partition getting in the way
Windows not booting after installing Ubuntu…. "missing operating system"
refit not installing properly
The solution: download and install got fdisk for mac... http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/ download rEFIt... http://refit.sourceforge.net/ MAKE BACKUP: once gdisk is installed go to terminal and type 'sudo disk /dev/disk0'. it will take you to the disk menu. once there enter 'b', and type a file name (it will automatically save in your home folder). once finish quit by entering 'q' installing refit... many people have difficulty installing refit. the trick is to install it manually (check out refit's documentation). reboot and you should see your new loader. partition your disk... you need to create two new partitions for windows and linux (disk utility works just fine). format both of them to FAT. install windows 7.... in the installer format the disk you want windows on as ntfs and finish through installation (note:your computer will reboot several times and each time it does make sure to boot from your new windows partition under refit). Once its all finished go ahead and install your boot camp drivers. your eject key won't work yet so you'll have to eject the setup disk from the control panel. install ubuntu... for this you are going to need both a live usb and live cd. create live usb: http://www.nightlion.net/guides/2011...line-diskutil/ and for the live cd simply burn the .iso with disk utility. with both the cd and the usb inserted in the computer, reboot and hold down the 'C' key on restart. It may take several minutes but you should get to the installer. In the installer select the advanced installation option. format and use the partition you set aside for linux. set the mount point to '/' and *install the grub boot loader to whatever partition your installing linux on. It will give you a warning about not having a swap partition, but you can ignore this for now and create a swap file inside your ubuntu later. install and reboot back into lion At the moment you now have a screwed up hybrid mbr table (this is because most likely your lion recovery disk uses one of your precious mbr slots) in order to fix this we are going to create a new hybrid mbr table. i have attached screenshots of this process. reopen terminal and again type 'sudo gdisk /dev/disk0'. this time enter 'r'. and then 'p'. this will print your partitions. now you need to create your hmbr so type 'h'. it will now ask you for the partitions you wish to enter. referring to the printed partition list, add your lion, windows and linux partitions. (in my case 2 4 5). next it will ask you to place efi partition first, select 'y'. now it will ask you for the mbr hex code for each partition. the codes you want are 'AF' for lion, '07' for windows, and '83' for linux. don't set any of the bootable flags. once finish enter 'w' to write these changes to the disks. You can also enter 'q' if you want to quit without saving changes. reboot and now you should be able to boot into each of your OSes. Tip: if for some reason it doesn't work and you want to restore your gpt table, simply go back to gdisk, enter 'r', enter 'l', and then type your backup filename. reboot and you'll no longer have you win or linux partitions but your gpt will gpt table will be back to normal. i hope this helps any and all of you. its not the prettiest guides and for that i apologize, but if you have any questions i'd be glad to answer them. Cheers! EDIT: if you want a 'common' partition, simply create three new partition at the beginning(one for win7, one for ubuntu, one for common). If you decide that you want a shared partition after you install win7 and ubuntu, simply create a new partition and the recreate your hybrid mbr as described above.
managing and repairing partition tables w/boot camp
It is no secret that I stand by Apple hardware — with my desk covered in far too much aluminium — but on a day-to-day basis I use OS X and Windows roughly equally. This means that for my portable setup (MBP 13" late-2009), I need a working copy of both operating systems, and the ability to switch between them with minimal effort.
Recently I have become more reliant on Dropbox in order to sync files between PCs (and in this case, OSes). This is generally more efficient than bringing git up-to-date each time i reboot, which would usually involve stashing, committing, pushing, pulling, popping stash every time. The problem created is that Dropbox doesn't sync instantly -- in fact it takes a fair amount of time.
Due to OS X not having write support to NTFS partitions (and vice-versa with Windows and HFS+) I had been unable to store dropbox in one location.
The plan? Create a new shared ExFAT (basically FAT64, with case-sensitivity and more goodness) partition which could be accessed by both operating systems, and use it solely to store my dropbox.
Intel 160gb SSD [120gb OS X | 8gb shared | 32gb Windows 7]
I have 11.2gb of dropbox storage using referrals and various promotions they have had over the years, but don't plan on using this much space in the near future, so settled for 8gb. Disk Utility on OS X allows resizing HFS+ partitions on-the-fly, so I freed up enough space and tried to make this happen... and then ran into some problems...
It was not meant to be:
No go. Disk Utility gave me random errors while trying to use the space that I assumed to be free. A quick reboot into Windows made it apparent that Disk Utility was unaware of the Lion recovery partition -- which exists after the end of the primary OS partition -- and was allowing me to create a partition larger than I should in fact be able to.
Settling for around 7.3gb, I set things up and did a test run. Found that the default cluster allocation size in both OS X and Windows when formatting ExFAT is 32kb (probably as an optimisation for USB/flash drives, which are the primary target medium for the ExFAT filesystem). So I reformatted the partition, and decided to try my luck and also remove the recovery partition. It shouldn't be used for anything under normal circumstances, right?!
It most definitely isn't, but in the process I upset the balance of things. During the Boot Camp setup process, a hybrid boot sector is made on the target disk, containing both MBR(windows) and GPT(os x) records. By changing the partition layout in windows, this caused the two do become desynced. OS X would no longer boot, and on further inspection (using a Lion install DVD.. err, memory stick) thought the primary HFS+ partition was now ExFAT.
"Ohshi--" was the first thing that ran through my head, and I mentally calculated how much data I would lose should I need to restore from backups (around 4 days, mostly iTunes imports/tagging). But of course I couldn't just give up and stop here; the night was young and I was curious as to how this could be fixed.
After doing a lot of searching around and finding some people in similar situations with the classic "reinstall your OS" responses, I set out with two utilities in hand that I was sure could be used to resolve the situation I caused.
rEFIt: an EFI boot manager and recovery suite, containing gptsync -- an app specifically made to bring the MBR record back in sync with the GPT table.
gpt-fdisk (aka gdisk): a release of fdisk which has gpt support. handily available in binary form for every OS!
A quick test using the rEFIt gptsync tool proved unsuccessful; it tried to sync the GPT over to MBR but failed due to the changes I made to the MBR in windows. I couldn't find a way to sync in the other direction. I took a photo of the disk's layout at this point, which showed start and end sectors for each partition in both MBR and GPT layouts. This would prove a life-saver after I proceeded to destroy my partition layouts beyond perceivably recoverable levels (let's skip this part lest this post turn into a book).
On to gdisk (running from windows), and I could now fix the gpt layout based on the photo I took previously. This process was fairly straightforward as I am familiar with fdisk commands, but there is plenty of information here that would help those that aren't.
End result? After about six hours I had recovered both OSes, removed the Lion recovery partition and created my new shared home for Dropbox. Was it worth it? I'll leave that for you to answer. I do recommend that if at all possible, you should do all your partitioning in OS X (and leave the recovery partition be) to avoid a similar situation.
I have been using a shared dropbox across both operating systems for a couple of days now and have hit a few bumps (which I will detail in a future post), but overall it feels *that* much better to not have to wait 10-30 minutes for Dropbox syncs. I have been switching OSes a lot more since the change, which means overall more productivity.
Lessons learnt:
Backup before playing with partitions.
Always keep a record of the original partition table layout, so you can restore if something goes wrong. As long as you don't format any partition changes all data is recoverable.
Windows prefers reading and writing the MBR when available, even though it supports GPT.
Keep rEFIt on a recovery USB stick or DVD (my 8gb usb stick now has OS X Lion Install and rEFIt).

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