# FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends in the

## linderox

Hello, this problem is probably general for almost all HP laptops...

My HP 6720s (core duo) came bundled with Windows Vista Basic with no CDs, but it had HP Recovery Manager application that generated a recovery partition along with boot loader (boot loader counts down for 5 seconds and waits for F11 keypress, if pressed, it will load recovery partition, otherwise it loads Vista).

This HP Recovery screwed up the partition table in such a way that any (Arch's, Ubuntu's, ..) cfdisk won't load any partition or drive. It will only output message "FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder", "Press any key to exit cfdisk".

I'm installing Archlinux with no problem on the hard drive. It installed nicely, however I skipped GRUB/LILO installment for sda. I tried to install GRUB to sda or sda2 where archlinux installed, but it gave me the following output on tty5:

Code:

grub> root (hd0,1)

 Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xf

grub> setup (hd0,1)

Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition

grub> quit

Now is there any way to fix the partition table so that cfdisk will run fine, and/or possibly allow GRUB to install on sda?

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## cyrillic

(hd0,1) does not seem to be the one you want.

Try using GRUB's tab-completion to see what partitions are available.

```
grub> root (hd0,<press tab> 
```

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