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#1 2013-06-26 13:58:52

djmally
Member
Registered: 2012-06-22
Posts: 8

[Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

I've been trying to partition my HDD during installation using cfdisk (just following the Beginner's Guide), which in and of itself works. I've created 2 partitions: /dev/sda3 for root and /dev/sda4 for home. Both of these are primary partitions, root (/dev/sda3) is a boot partition, and both are of sufficient size for the installation. However, whenever I try, as per the Beginner's Guide, to run "mount /dev/sda3 /mnt", I get an error saying that it cannot be mounted due to a bad superblock or some other, unspecified error. I've already tried formatting the partitions as NTFS through Windows, but when I did that and finished the installation, I was able to get to GRUB but then I couldn't actually boot Arch. My laptop is about 2 years old, and I've had Arch installed on it before (but I had a friend help me install it last time), so there's definitely not a legacy hardware issue. It's also not UEFI, and I'm using MBR, not GPT. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get the partitions to mount properly? Thanks!

Last edited by djmally (2013-06-26 15:30:29)

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#2 2013-06-26 14:13:55

drcouzelis
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From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
Website

Re: [Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

djmally wrote:

However, whenever I try, as per the Beginner's Guide, to run "mount /dev/sda3 /mnt", I get an error saying that it cannot be mounted due to a bad superblock or some other, unspecified error. I've already tried formatting the partitions as NTFS through Windows

After creating a partition then you must format it with a filesystem before you can mount it. What filesystem did you use to format /dev/sda3?

The popular choice is Ext4.

Last edited by drcouzelis (2013-06-26 14:14:27)

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#3 2013-06-26 14:18:15

djmally
Member
Registered: 2012-06-22
Posts: 8

Re: [Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

Ah, that's likely the problem. I'm not too familiar with cfdisk, so I probably neglected to format the partition properly. I'm guessing there's more to it than just creating a new partition, setting it to primary, and then setting its size?

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#4 2013-06-26 14:26:00

drcouzelis
Member
From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
Website

Re: [Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

It's in the Beginner's Guide:

Beginner's Guide wrote:

Simply partitioning is not enough; the partitions also need a filesystem. To format the partitions with an ext4 filesystem blabitty blah blah

cfdisk does not do formatting.

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#5 2013-06-26 14:26:35

djmally
Member
Registered: 2012-06-22
Posts: 8

Re: [Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

Gotcha. Good job me for not reading things properly. Thanks for the help!

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#6 2013-06-26 15:00:21

WonderWoofy
Member
From: Los Gatos, CA
Registered: 2012-05-19
Posts: 8,414

Re: [Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

You said you formatted the partitions in windows to ntfs... you're not trying to install Linux on ntfs are you?  In case you are, stop now, start again.  NTFS is not POSIX compliant.

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#7 2013-06-26 15:13:57

drcouzelis
Member
From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
Website

Re: [Solved] Partitioning Issue With cfdisk

You're welcome. smile You're welcome to mark the thread as "[SOLVED]".

For a moment I thought you were trying to install Arch Linux on a partition formatted with NTFS. Yeek. yikes

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