1 Topic by Scotty B

  • Scotty B
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  • Registered: 2008-09-14
  • Posts: 1

Topic: GParted won't boot from CD now.

I have an old XP computer with an 80Gb second hard drive. I wanted to use half of the 80Gb drive to install Ubuntu. This was my first time using Ubuntu and I wasn't aware it had its own partition software during installation, so instead I burned the iso of Gparted. I used the disc in the computer and restarted and GParted started fine. The 80Gb drive was formatted NTFS, so I added a partition and formatted it FAT32 (divided approx 50/50 or ~40Gb). I then restarted Windows (FYI: I could no longer access the NTFS partition, so I formatted it within Windows and it worked fine, I could access the new FAT32 partition just fine).

I loaded the Ubuntu CD and restarted and began installing. When I got to the partition part, I screwed up and slid the bar as far as it would go to the right and began to install (leaving maybe 5Gb for installation). At some point it said there was no room left on the drive and it couldn't complete installation. Realizing my mistake, I was going to load GParted again and redo my partitions, however it will no longer boot the CD and if I try to access it within Windows, it slows way down and I'm stuck w/the hourglass until I force quit (not responding).

The system will boot from the Ubuntu CD however, so I am reinstalling, this time using 99% of the remaining ~35Gb (for some reason I can't use 100%, which I think I what got me screwed up the first time). So far installation is going fine, but when it is done, I would still like to run GParted and fix (combine) the remaining partitions on the drive.

Thanks for any help you can offer,
Scotty B

2 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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  • From: near Frankfurt/Main, Germany
  • Registered: 2008-07-31
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Re: GParted won't boot from CD now.

Hi!

Since you still can boot from the Ubuntu CD, your problem must have something to do with the GParted CD you burned.
Experience shows that today's writable CDs are typically not the best quality; depending on the media and the recorder, they degrade more or less quickly (I've even seen discs that weren't readable directly after burning - in the very same CD recorder that was used to write the data on them!). Thus, burning a new GParted CD could solve the problem!

By the way: You could also use rewritable CDs for such "experimenting". This will save you the cost of several CD-Rs - and due to their completely different chemical structure, CD-RWs are also more resistant to degradation by sunlight or moisture (CD-RWs use a "phase change" material as data recording layer; this layer changes between a crystalline and an amorph state under the influence of the writing laser. These states differ in the amount of light they reflect. In contrast to this, CD-Rs use an organic dye which is destroyed locally by the laser - and this organic material can more easily be destroyed or influenced by outside effects than the anorganic phase-change layer of the CD-RW).