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Last night I installed Ubuntu 11.10 alongside my Win 7 installation. Now, when I restart the laptop it comes up with a list of errors (Out of Partition; No Suitable Mode Found, etc...) then loads GRUB (?). It doesn't matter what choice I make from the list of OS's, it then comes up with 'No Such Partition' numerous times, then eventually 'Unknown Filesystem'.

I made a Windows Repair Disk before doing the install, and when I run that it gives me an option to repair the boot setup. If I run it, however, it says everything is fine.

Also, when the GRUB menu is presented, I can drop to a command line. If I try to do something here, even run 'help', I get the 'No Such Partition' messages, and eventually the 'Unknown Filesystem' error.

Any help appreciated!

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What brand of notebook is this, HP? – Moab Dec 7 '11 at 23:28
Yes Moab, HP 6550b – Kim Dec 8 '11 at 3:58

1 Answer

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You damaged the HP partition structure, the boot partition (and possibly others) has been changed to "Dynamic" which is a non bootable partition type.

How this happened, when you created the 5th partition this is when it changed one or more of the already existing partitions to Dynamic, this happens because you are only allowed 4 primary partitions which HP notebooks have from the factory.

This will be difficult to correct, the best way is to use your HP recovery discs to restore the PC back to factory partitioning, then follow this guide to properly create more than 4 partitions without defaulting any to Dynamic.

Back up any data before you use the HP recovery discs, as all partitions and data will be wiped during the recovery process.

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Moab, how do you know the 5 partition was created? How do you know the partitions have been changed to dynamic? I found on the HP web site where they say you CAN delete the recovery partition if required (which I did). This took the number of partitions down to three... – Kim Dec 8 '11 at 6:10
Also, I don't have HP recovery disks. I spent an hour looking for the HP Recovery application in Windows last night, and eventually settled for the Windows Repair disk... – Kim Dec 8 '11 at 6:13
You will need to order a Recovery disc set from HP...h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/… – Moab Dec 8 '11 at 17:21
Usually Linux requires 2 partitions, even though you deleted one, it probably created a 5th. Its an educated guess the partitions were changed to Dynamic, which explains the problems you are having, only way to know for sure is to use a live boot cd to look at the partition structure of the drive. – Moab Dec 8 '11 at 17:25

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