What partitions should I see when using Gparted?

Question

When I'm trying to dual boot Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 8.1 and I get to creating partitions for Ubuntu in gparted, I see tons of partitions which I have no idea what they are. On windows partition editor I can only see four and I recognize them all. I don't even see my windows partition on gparted. Is this normal? Gparted also comes up with errors as 'invalid argument during seek for read on /dev/sda' 'the backup GPT table is corrupt but the primary appears to be ok so that will be used' These are links to screenshots of each partition table: Http:''imgur.com/t8E6whs

Answer 1

Using this image as reference, under the Device column (top to bottom):

• /dev/sda - the name of the actual drive
• /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2,...,/dev/sda7 - are all partitions on said drive

If you look at the Type column, you can see the partition formats:

• ntfs for /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 probably mean they are windows partitions
• ext4 for /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda7 these are linux partitions
• swap for /dev/sda6 is linux swap (as indicated by the chart at the upper part of the picture)

For extra safety, you can use windows disk manager to 'empty' the area on the disk you want ubuntu to use. that way when you boot up ubuntu it will show up as 'allocated disk space' (usually marked in grey on gparted), then let the installer use that area on the disk.

I've done this many times over the past 7 years. but not since I got my current laptop (over a year ago). at the time I found the older version of this guide to be very helpful.