12.04 installer won't accept mis-alligned partition

Question

So I upgraded Ubuntu from 10.04 to 12.04 and it had issues. Long story short, I backed up everything and want to reinstall.

The installer apparently REALLY doesn't like installing on mis-aligned partitions. I get the error The partition /dev/sda5 assigned to / starts on an offset of 3072 bytes... There are two buttons at the bottom "Go Back" and "Continue" the problem is that they both do the same thing - namely it kicks me back to the partition table screen.

How do I force it to continue?

note: Formatting the entire drive is not an option as it has a windows installation on there (sda1, 2 and 3)

Answer 1

If you allow the 12.04 installer to create the partitions it will round up the starting and ending sectors so that they will fall on a megabyte boundary--even if the preceding partition doesn't end on a megabyte boundary. In fact, it only allows locations and sizes to be specified as integral number of megabytes.

I suggest that you use the installer to add the partition(s) you will be using for Ubuntu (by clicking Other rather than choosing to format the entire disk, of course).

As an example I manually created a first partition ending at sector 4000 and allowed the Ubuntu installer to create the root partition following it. The following was the result:

   Device Boot      Start       End      Blocks    ID  System
/dev/sda1           2048        4000       976+    83  Linux
/dev/sda2           4096    20969471   10482688    83  Linux   

I was able to get the install going on /dev/sda2.

I must admit it's not clear to me what panel is displaying the message you are seeing. The partitioning panel has Quit, Back, and Install Now buttons at the bottom.

If you don't find this helpful please post more information about how you partitioned the disk and where you are getting the message.