[Sussex] Help with getting started please

[Malcolm Harris]

Dear Desmond and Jacqui,

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu has installed because I started the install process
again thinking it had failed but when I got to the partitioning it was
proposing to install besides the existing partition of Ubuntu. I think the
problem is the lack of or misplacing of grub.

The hard disk is 80 gb. It is partitioned with Windows C and D drives and
now apparently Ubuntu. The Ubuntu segment is around 18 gb.

Sorry Jacqui, not clear how you get at sfdisk - this is all new to me.


Westerham



On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Jacqui Caren-home <
jacqui.caren at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Desmond Armstrong wrote:
>
>> On 11/07/10 21:00, Malcolm Harris wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks for the suggestion Desmond,
>>>
>>> I got an install disk burnt after 3 attempts and I think I did a
>>> partitioned install on the decrepit PC (Windoze Explorer is saying that it's
>>> disk has shrunk).......*but* unfortunately I can't get the dual boot option
>>> just cluttering clanking XP as usual!
>>>
>>
>> O.K.
>> Need to do a little analysis here.
>> Firstly do you know what the size of the harddisk is? You may need to
>> actually look at the label on it to be sure.
>>
>> Now there are a couple of things I would suggest:-
>>
>> Firstly download a copy of Puppy, burn a CD and then boot from that. This
>> is a useful tool as it will show the partitions. As it runs as a Live CD it
>> does not do anything to your existing system. In fact the panic button is
>> remove the power.
>>
>> Now another tool which is rather good is gparted (gparted.sourceforge.net).
>> This tool shows the partitions and you can manipulate them, but be careful,
>> very careful.
>>
>
> While trying to recover my local disks I used
>
> sfdisk -s to get the size of each hard drive
> then used sfdisk -l /dev/xxxxx to dislap the partitions.
>
> i.e.
> [root at dieter ~]# sfdisk -s
> /dev/sda: 488386584
> /dev/sdb: 1953514584
> /dev/sdc: 1953514584
> /dev/sde: 488386584
> /dev/sdf: 1465138584
> total: 6348940920 blocks
> [root at dieter ~]# sfdisk -l /dev/sda
>
> Disk /dev/sda: 60801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
> Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
>
>   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1   *      0+     12      13-    104391   83  Linux
> /dev/sda2         13   60800   60788  488279610   8e  Linux LVM
> /dev/sda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
> /dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
> [root at dieter ~]#
>
> The trick is to NOT run sfdisk without an option!
>
> I also used a live distro that had sshd and networking.
> Then I could ssh into the machine from another box and cut and paste
> the output (like above) into a file. Saves having to write all of the above
> guff by hand. *shudder*
>
> Jacqui
> Jacqui
>
>
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