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3TB drive partitions:

  1. ntfs (100mb) - reserved by Windows 7
  2. ntfs (70Gb) - system partition for Windows 7
  3. unallocated 100Gb for Ubuntu
  4. ntfs (385Gb) common files -deocs.. etc... as suggested by 1 mil outdated of linux pages
  5. unallocated
  6. unllocated

Partitions 5 and 6 are the rest of the 2.3TB

I have acronis for partitioning...

When I try to install ubuntu 11.10 on partition 3 using LiveCD, the installation just stop there... error... too many sectors... msdos... ?

Any help will be appreciated.

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    If you're using an older version of acronis you need one of the later versions with GPT support: see this article forum.acronis.com/forum/24111 ... The idea is that huge drives can't use the older msdos partition table structure.
    – RobotHumans
    Apr 18, 2012 at 0:31
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    We need more information around the "blah blah" part.
    – Jorge Castro
    Apr 18, 2012 at 0:48
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    MBR can have at most 4 primary partitions. You seem to describe 6 so I am guessing that primary #4 houses 5 and 6 which are logical partitions. But generally 'unallocated' means not part of a partition so I'm not sure how you could have two of them in a row (that'd just be one continuous unallocated region) so I'm going to assume that 5 and 6 unformatted as opposed to unallocated. Acronis is a good program, but as mentioned it will run into issues with 3 TB drives due to the age of the MBR system.
    – Huckle
    Apr 18, 2012 at 4:33
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    What you want is to format the drive in the new standard called GUID Partition Table (GPT for short). Linux and Mac OSX will boot this natively, Windows needs to be 'tricked' into doing it. This is possible because the GPT structure exists within the MBR structure, so Windows can continue to think it is on a MBR disk, and all other OSes are fine with the fact that it is really GPT. There are many good guides on how to do this, but it is a requirement to use gparted as Acronis will not align the GPT and MBR records properly.
    – Huckle
    Apr 18, 2012 at 4:36
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    sounds like a whole answer there @Huckle
    – Mateo
    Apr 18, 2012 at 14:02

1 Answer 1

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Huckle wrote this in comments (and this much better than no answer at all!):

MBR can have at most 4 primary partitions. You seem to describe 6 so I am guessing that primary #4 houses 5 and 6 which are logical partitions. But generally 'unallocated' means not part of a partition so I'm not sure how you could have two of them in a row (that'd just be one continuous unallocated region) so I'm going to assume that 5 and 6 unformatted as opposed to unallocated. Acronis is a good program, but as mentioned it will run into issues with 3 TB drives due to the age of the MBR system.

– Huckle Apr 18 '12 at 4:33

What you want is to format the drive in the new standard called GUID Partition Table (GPT for short). Linux and Mac OSX will boot this natively, Windows needs to be 'tricked' into doing it. This is possible because the GPT structure exists within the MBR structure, so Windows can continue to think it is on a MBR disk, and all other OSes are fine with the fact that it is really GPT. There are many good guides on how to do this, but it is a requirement to use gparted as Acronis will not align the GPT and MBR records properly.

– Huckle Apr 18 '12 at 4:36

Anyone may of course feel free to expand this, or to post their own answers, further illustrating these principles and techniques.

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