Partition table messed up?

drogenkontrolle · 14 Jun 2010

Im having some problems putting windows 7 on my iMac. At first, it worked fine. But i lost the reinstall disk so i made an image backup on my external hard drive. Before, i was triple booting Ubuntu, OS X, and Windows 7. I had a huge problem in windows so i restored from a backup. But now, my bootloader rEFIt keeps trying to change my mbr. whenever i try to, it makes windows unbootable. I have the MBR contents, and i noticed that it says theres 2 NTFS partitions. and when i try to install ubuntu, it wants to format the NTFS Partition and delete windows. Is there a way to fix it so i can have all three booting?
Here is the report of the hard disk.

*** Report for internal hard disk ***

Current GPT partition table:
# Start LBA End LBA Type
1 40 409639 EFI System (FAT)
2 409640 976836311 Mac OS X HFS+
3 977098752 1953523711 MS Reserved

Current MBR partition table:
# A Start LBA End LBA Type
1 1 409639 ee EFI Protective
2 409640 981614631 07 NTFS/HPFS
3 * 981614632 1953520064 07 NTFS/HPFS

MBR contents:
Boot Code: Unknown, but bootable

Partition at LBA 40:
Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
File System: FAT32
Listed in GPT as partition 1, type EFI System (FAT)

Partition at LBA 409640:
Boot Code: None
File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
Listed in GPT as partition 2, type Mac OS X HFS+
Listed in MBR as partition 2, type 07 NTFS/HPFS

Partition at LBA 977098752:
Boot Code: Windows BOOTMGR (Vista)
File System: NTFS
Listed in GPT as partition 3, type MS Reserved

Partition at LBA 981614632:
Boot Code: Windows BOOTMGR (Vista)
File System: NTFS
Listed in MBR as partition 3, type 07 NTFS/HPFS, active

Night Hawk · 15 Jun 2010

I may not be much help with the Mac part but I can explain why ubuntu wants to reformat the two MS volumes you have there. Any distro will need to see at least one VFat or subsitute Fat 32 volume to install onto. That would be called the "root" file system partition whether primary or extended as far as the partition type.

The ubuntu installer mainly wants to reserve the entire with the automatic install while you will need to select the manual partitioning option before anything else goes wrong in order to see the distro reinstalled. Then you can manually select the intended root partiion(primary in this case) for ubuntu to install onto.

Note the root partition must be made the mount point "/" using the partition edit option to avoid seeing Grub installed into the Windows mbr. The boot loader you use will then be directed to the information found on the root itself when selecting ubuntu. Often installing Windows last will insure that as the default OS and bootable since other OSs will effectively replace the Windows mbr entries with their own.