Arch Linux

AugustePop

Member

Registered: 2010-04-27

Posts: 95

bios complaing about bad partition

the disk is partitioned in gpt with gdisks. and a bios boot partition is made in sector 34-2047 for grub-bios. and i am not using uefi.

the bios complains for the bad partition, but after i press enter, the laptop boots correctly as intended.

i dd'ed /dev/urandom into the disk before partition. is it possible this has something to do with the bios warning?

Last edited by AugustePop (2013-05-17 05:10:29)

SolarBoyMatt

Member

Registered: 2012-01-07

Posts: 263

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

Probably not, but posting the complete error message would be more helpful than saying it complains. You need to be more clear too, which partition is it complaining about? Are there any side effects other than that error message? If Arch is working normally it could be a issue with your bios.

Last edited by SolarBoyMatt (2013-05-17 14:51:59)

AugustePop

Member

Registered: 2010-04-27

Posts: 95

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

i do not have access to the laptop right now. all i can say is that bios prints a one line message complaining about bad partition table, nothing specific, and stays there. and after i hit enter, i see the two lines indicating grub running and after that, everything goes on fine.

i tend to believe it's a bios bug. i am just thinking maybe i can find a way to circumvent this and have a clean boot process.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

SolarBoyMatt is right.  Your post is far too vague for anyone to be of real help to you.  I mean you don't even mention your hardware for cying out loud!

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,332

Website

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

the bios complains for the bad partition

bios prints a one line message complaining about bad partition table

Those are not the same thing.  You can claim it is not very specific, but I'm quite sure it is much more specific than this.  If you want any help from other users, you need to post the actual messages.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

AugustePop

Member

Registered: 2010-04-27

Posts: 95

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

ok. i have access to the laptop now.

the warning shown on the screen is:
Invalid partition table!

the model is dell latitude e5430.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

There are some systems that don't like GPT for whatever reason.  I seem to remember some Dells being amongst those.  Try converting the partition table to MBR and try again.

srs5694

Member

From: Woonsocket, RI

Registered: 2012-11-06

Posts: 719

Website

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

Most BIOSes that don't like GPT are actually just looking for an MBR partition that's flagged as being bootable. You can use Linux fdisk (but not parted or gdisk) to set the type-0xEE partition bootable to work around this problem. This might be preferable to converting from GPT to MBR.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: bios complaing about bad partition

That is really good info there srs5694. 

@OP
What he is saying is that to work around this problem of not having a MBR partition not being marked bootable, you can actually just mark the protective MBR bootable itself.  If you don't know, GPT partitioning still uses MBR partitioning in a way.  What is does is it creates a "partition" that spans the whole disk so that programs that only understand MBR partitioning don't look at the disk and think "Hey!  Look at all that space I can use as I please!"  Hence it is referred to as the "protective MBR".

If you want to mark that partition as bootable, you can use a program that is only MBR aware to modify that only.  Hence gdisk and parted cannot do this since they both understand GPT as well.  This is why he is suggesting fdisk, as it is meant for only MBR partitioning and can't handle GPT.  It doesn't understand it beyond being able to tell you that there is a GPT present and that you should use something besides fdisk.  For the purposes of what you are trying to do though, you can safely disregard that warning.