Ubuntu – Ubuntu installer thinks the drive is empty, does not see windows partitions

10.10filesystemgpartedpartitioning

I am trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 64bit. I just installed Windows 7 64bit moments ago. My drive is currently partitioned like so:

100MB Boot partition (automatically made by Windows 7 installer)
390GB Windows partition
~1.6TB free space

When I go through the Ubuntu installer it does not give me the option to install alongside another operating system. My only options are to use the entire disk or to specify partitions manually. When I chose to specify partitions manually it tells me that the drive is all free space!

Windows is still booting and behaving normally, and I had not doing anything in Windows yet (had simply installed, booted for first time, then immediately restarted). I am even able to mount the windows partition within Ubuntu Live CD, and see it in the disk viewer (not GParted). GParted in Ubuntu Live CD again reports no partitions, all free space.

Not sure what to do :S. I have installed Windows 7 alongside Ubuntu countless times, even Ubuntu 10.10.

Thank you very much for your help :).

Edit: I tried adding a partition through Disk Utility since it identifies the partitions, it failed. However GParted now identifies the free sapces as a NTFS partition. I used to have Ubuntu as my only O/S before I wiped to add windows 7. I wonder if there is some remnant of the old partition table left over that the Windows installer wasn't wiping over, so GParted was getting confused on where partitions started/ended.

I am trying to create the partition table/partitions with GParted now and see if that helps.

I got to install Windows 7 first unfortunately since I can never figure out how to repair grub once Windows has stomped on it.

Best Answer

If there is a remnant of the old partition table left then it's easy to get rid of it. Just run a dd like so:

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=512

Only run this if you are sure you want to erase all partitions and start over. "sda" is the harddrive you're working with.

If you do this you will have to reinstall Windows 7 again. I'd recommend creating the partitions with the Ubuntu Live CD, that way the Windows installer doesn't create the 100MB System Partiton anymore, and you can be sure that the partitions are actually there. Good luck.