Help formatting disk

[aleff]

Hi, I have a problem that perhaps one of the gurus can solve. My laptop has a 500 g hardrive wnich came with Win7 preinstalled and I didn't want to mess with it, so I repartioned it using Easeus and Win7 disk management into 150g fat32 for Lion, 150g ntfs where win7 is, 75g fat32 for data and 7g for ubuntu swap and 118g ext3 where ubuntu 12.04 is installed, with last two being logical. There were no choices for hfs so I couldn't take care of it at this stage. I booted up with a bootable usb restored with retail 10.3 lion dmg and got the black screen of death. Eventually, I was able to boot up with iatkos L2 and went into disk utility to format my lion partition and there was no tab for format but I hit the erase tab and in the format menu chose hfs+ journaled but got an error message saying partition table could not be altered. Tried every which way without success. Since I can access terminal, may be I can accomplish this using fdisk; I want to be careful and not mess anything up so could somebody point out the best way to solve my problem in foolproof detail please. I assume that once this is solved, the rest of the installation will go smoothly.

[Foxic]

You may have to re-sync your partition table as partitioning an MBR drive with both ntfs and hfs+ can cause a hybrid GPT/MBR.

 

Boot into ubuntu and do the following:

1. Type sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list and hit enter. You will be asked for your administrator (login) password to continue. This will load the list of sources for the package updater in the text editor vi so that we can add a new source.
   
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the file using page down or simply by pressing the down arrow. When you reach the end of the file, press the letter o. This will open the edit mode on a new line.
   
3. Type deb http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian sid main
    
   
   
4. Press ESC. This will exit edit mode.
   
5. Type :wq and hit enter. This will save the file and exit the text editor. If you make a mistake, you can exit without saving by typing :q!.
   
6. Now we want to actually install gptsync. Type sudo apt-get install gptsync and hit enter. Install commands should pop up and (hopefully) it should install successfully.
    
   
   
7. Type sudo gptsync /dev/sda and hit enter. You will receive a message to update partitions from MBR to GPT. Type y and hit enter.
    
   
   

[aleff]

James, Thanks for the prompt assistance. I want to make sure that gptsync is the problem. When I decided to do a triple boot before, I started with a clean hd and used osx disk utility to make 3 partitions hfs+, fat32, fat32. Installed retail SL on #1 using GUID. Then installed Ubuntu 10.04 on #2 with no swap and did gptsync. Everything works fine and haven't gotten around to installing win7 yet. In this case, I can't even make partition #1 hfs+ and in any case want to leave it mbr. I have gptsync.deb on a flash drive and can install it if that will do no harm to the rest of the hd and then go back and see if I can format partition #1.

[aleff]

I did solve this problem eventually after a fair amount of searching and here it is in case someone else is interested. Went into diskpart in win7 and selected the partition and ran the command "set=af". This formatted it to something resembling hfs+ and then diskutility could do the rest. I have further problems downstream and may come back begging for help.