Hard drive partitioning failed

[giser3546]

I am in the process of instaling Kubuntu, and when attempting to repartition the hard drive I got two errors saying partitioning failed. I tried it again and walked away for a second and got a message that it worked. After restarting I get an error reading;

error; couldn't read file.
error; you need to load kernel first.

failed to boot default and fallback entries.

Press any key to continue...

(when key was pressed)

[ 0.682931] kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown - block (0.0)



I'm new to this and have no idea what to do...

[dibl]

Re: Hard drive partitioning failed

Heh -- sounds like you are DEEP IN!

With no insight into what you have there, or exactly what your intentions are, let me suggest a couple of things:

1. Do the hard drive partitioning in advance of installing, with a tool made for the purpose: http://partedmagic.com/

2. If it turns out that the hard drive has a corrupted Master Boot Record, such that the partitioning table is not being written, well, that's a very bad sign. You could try to zeroize the drive, using "dd". Boot a Live CD. The hard drive(s) will be unmounted. In the console, run

sudo fdisk -lu

to verify the device number of your target hard drive. Let's assume it is /dev/sdb.

Open a console and issue

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1

Let it run until it is finished (a minute or so).

Then if you boot your Parted Magic Live CD, and choose "Partitioner", you should be able to set a "MS-DOS" new partition table, and then proceed with partitioning. If you can't, you've probably got a dead hard drive.

On your Kubuntu CD, I hope you did the md5sum check on the downloaded ISO file, and then burned the CD at the slowest speed available on your burning software.