Bad Primary Partition

Carlwill · 2010-08-20 17:34:38

I have a PC with two identical Western Digital 750 GB S-ATA drives. The drives are in perfect working order. I have installed Debian and Slackware on them fine. Now when I go to install Arch and select the drives using 'cfdisk', I get this error:

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder - Press any key to exit cfdisk.

I then tried to install Ubuntu, works. I install Debian again, it works. Why does Arch or cfdisk not allow me to partition my drives?

R00KIE · 2010-08-20 22:08:37

Because cfdisk (which is not used by other distros I believe) wants to find everything aligned with cylinder boundaries and that partition's end is not aligned with a cylinder end, cfdisk complains and aborts.

I can't remember if this is possible but try creating the partitions before running the installer and then just select the partition and mount point, if cfdisk is not needed then it should just work.

Inxsible · 2010-08-20 23:20:38

I concur with Rookie. use GPArted or you can even use the Ubuntu installer cds that you have to create the partitions first and then try re-installing Arch.

THCMyst · 2010-08-21 03:55:59

Have you tried using fdisk? I had an issue with this using cfdisk, and as weird as it sounds, I used fdisk to partition, went back into cfdisk, and everything was in order. Not sure how that works, but it's a suggestion to try.

R00KIE · 2010-08-21 20:37:16

THCMyst wrote:

Have you tried using fdisk? I had an issue with this using cfdisk, and as weird as it sounds, I used fdisk to partition, went back into cfdisk, and everything was in order. Not sure how that works, but it's a suggestion to try.

That can and will cause problems if cfdisk is invoked afterwards. cfdisk is very strick when creating partitions or dealing with a disk with a partition table, in a way that is good, some partition managers (an example is partition magic) will completely refuse to do anything on a disk that does not have a very strict partition layout.

Linux will boot from pretty much any partition and partition layout and will not complain at all, but older versions of windows (I don't have experience with anything newer than xp) can be quite picky and have problems with "uncommon" partition layouts (such as extended partitions mysteriously vanishing) which cfdisk avoids.

Like I have said before, if there is no need to edit the partitions (as in partitions created before running arch's installer) then selecting the partition, filesystem and mountpoint should work without problems.

skodabenz · 2010-08-22 06:44:58

If it is a WD Advanced Format drive (4K sector), do not use cfdisk. In these drives the partitions should be aligned by 4K or 1MB, not cylinder alignment. GParted 0.6.2 and recent util-linux-ng fdisk (not sfdisk or cfdisk) or "parted -a optimal" (parted >=2.3) support these alignment options.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-20 17:34:38

Bad Primary Partition

#2 2010-08-20 22:08:37

Re: Bad Primary Partition

#3 2010-08-20 23:20:38

Re: Bad Primary Partition

#4 2010-08-21 03:55:59

Re: Bad Primary Partition

#5 2010-08-21 20:37:16

Re: Bad Primary Partition

#6 2010-08-22 06:44:58

Re: Bad Primary Partition

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