Using parted

FrankRizz0 · l33t Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 617

Good afternoon all!

So I completely broke my Gentoo lappy and had to reinstall. Everything went very well until the end of the installation, when grub wouldn't complete. I received the error that it did not look like an EFI installation. Upon further looking, my partition scheme said that /dev/sda1's filesystem was NTFS. I have no idea how this happened, but now when I went back to the beginning (started ALL OVER again) it still says that my /dev/sda1 is NTFS. I'm using the sysrescue cd and I've been installing remotely from another box. Can I just change the file system to ext3 through the GParted gui? Will this work?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2017 1:22 am Post subject:

Well I would hope that you didn't actually install on an ntfs partition, I think that would actually fail.

However the partition table also keeps indication of what type of filesystem is suspected to be on a particular partition. This identifier byte has nothing to do with the actual format of the partition and can be changed at will at any time unlike the "real" format of the partition.

I suspect parted can change this identifier byte much like the CLI fdisk(8) command. And there's no official "ext2" identifier at least for MBR partition tables, normally you just specify the partition as "Linux" (0x82). I'm not sure about GPT/GUID.

Linux tends to ignore the contents of this identifier unless detecting for RAID devices and some other situations.
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FrankRizz0 · l33t Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 617

Thanks for replying eccerr0r. I used the GParted gui in the sysrescue cd, changed it to ext3 and it worked! It was really weird, after I had wiped the partition table and started the installation all over again sda1 still had the file system as NTFS, I couldn't change it using fdisk and parted to delete the partition table. Once I used the GParted gui and changed it to ext3 grub was able to set itself up and I was good to go. Maybe for future reference, is there a better way to wipe the drive so there's no resemblance of the previous set up?

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:05 am Post subject:

You'd have to completely zero out the disk (or at least all metadata locations that the OS would check, usually first and last 1MB of the disk is sufficient) and reboot (or force reread of partition table) to make it really know the disk is blank.

A quick destroy you could