# fdisk Does not See NTFS Partition



## novafluxx (Aug 27, 2010)

I have a new Dell 1440 laptop, and attempted to put PC-BSD on it. That ended in disaster, and I blamed myself for a mistake. I have since reinstalled Windows 7 into a partition using roughly 55% of the disk space, leaving the rest of the disk empty, with no partition.

I attempted PCBSD again, and part of the original problem reoccurred. It only listed "empty space" and showed the entire disk as empty. It did not see the existing partition.

I type this right now from said laptop, inside of Windows 7. Disk Management shows me that I have roughly ~140GB empty space on the disk.

I decided to try to create the sliced and set things up from FreeBSD's fdisk that I acces via sysinstall.

fdisk shows the same thing. Empty space on ad0. I'm not quiete sure what is going on, as I was able to install FreeBSD and PCBSD onto my desktop on a disk that had an NTFS partition on it as well.

If it means anything, I was able to install Ubuntu and dual boot just fine before I attempted to install PCBSD that first time.

Note: I get an error about geometry being incorrect or something when I used fdisk from FreeBSD 8.1 USB image. I also received this error while installing to my desktop and that went smoothly.

Any advice/suggestions would be appreciated. Please feel free to ask me any for any more information.

Does gparted support the file systems that FreeBSD uses, if so I can use that program to create everything and then just install FreeBSD to existing slices/partitions.

Thank you


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## novafluxx (Aug 29, 2010)

Well, its been a couple days. I guess everyone's at a loss like me. It must be a weird one, so I'll just go with Windows and openSUSE or Fedora or something.


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## stuntgp2000 (Aug 29, 2010)

First, I'd recommend to you use gparted found either on Ubuntu LiveCD or by downloading from here. Then try to adjust your hard disk layout by keeping only the NTFS partition and a second one as "Unformatted" not as empty space as you did, this way both PC-BSD will see it.

Hope this helps.


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## novafluxx (Sep 4, 2010)

stuntgp2000 said:
			
		

> First, I'd recommend to you use gparted found either on Ubuntu LiveCD or by downloading from here. Then try to adjust your hard disk layout by keeping only the NTFS partition and a second one as "Unformatted" not as empty space as you did, this way both PC-BSD will see it.
> 
> Hope this helps.



I think I know the problem. I think, for whatever reason, my hard drive was using GPT and not MBP partitioning scheme.

Currently I have Fedora 13 installed and using one of the tools, I forget the name, it straight up tells me the partitioning scheme is GPT, GUID Partition Table.

I've read that the default tools included with FreeBSD, and consequently PC-BSD, don't understand GPT partitioning, and that there is another tool I must use.


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## novafluxx (Sep 12, 2010)

Apparently I can use gpt or gpart from the livefs disc to try to create a place for BSD to live on my disk...not sure how though...requires more research:stud


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