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I've bought a new laptop (dell inspiron 15 3521) with windows 8. Since I mainly use linux I removed the 7 partitions windows 8 apparently needed and made 4 partitions using a pmagic live usb (windows 80 gb, linux 80 gb, data 150 gb, swap 8 gb) and since I had some problems with getting it to boot from a dvd I installed linux first without problems.

But when I got the dvd to work (legacy mode and the a driver on a usb plugged in during installation Serial-ATA_Driver_85FV7_WN_11.7.0.1013_A01) it gave an error (windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style.).

To fix this I removed all partitions (including the ubuntu partition) and made a new one. windows also made a dedicated windows partition of 100mb.

After the timely installation of windows 7 I got out my ubuntu 13.04 usb drive and preformed a live boot. When I got to the point of creating a new partition (using the ubuntu 13.04 installer) for linux the partition manager didn't show any partitions on the drive at all only 320 gb of 'unallocated space'. I was however able to mount the partitions on the drive. So I know they are there and that ubuntu can see them.

So I booted with my pmagic live usb and the partition editor promted me with the following question:

Warning: /dev/sda contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table.
However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should.
Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT
partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an
msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table?
Yes/No? 

Who can help me to fix this problem?

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See the following Web site for details:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/missing-parts/index.html

Basically, when you installed Windows, its partitioner only partially erased the GPT data structures, leaving a disk that's technically MBR, but with enough GPT data left over that it's confusing libparted, upon which the Ubuntu installer depends. You must delete the leftover GPT data structures in order to use the disk.

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  • yeah, I figured (a bit slow but, ooh well). Thanks for the help though
    – Akisame
    Sep 24, 2013 at 22:37

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