Alright in that case you should be able to resurrect your drive. Most installation problems arise when choosing partition options. It may take a couple of tries to get it right. If in doubt let me know. Best of luck!
At some point I may try to repartition that drive using Ubuntu, I could care less about the files on there because I already have all my music backed up elsewhere.
And if you do try Ubuntu choose the following partitioning options. i) guided use entire disk This should reformat and install ubuntu on you drive witout problems. (Note that you will delete all files on the drive so take a backup prior if you have stored something important)
Btw one of the advantages of choosing ubuntu is the massive userbase. People have already run into almost every possible problem. You are also always welcome to post more details here and I will try to help
Sorry to hear about you drives. Sounds like your hardrive partitioning is incompatible with the os you installed or something went wrong during installation. My best guess is your harddrives are fine. I would recommend ubuntu as first linux destro where the installation process should be somewhat intuitive. You can re partition secondary drives once you have installe ubuntu on you main disk.
I have a 2TB solid state drive that I installed Linux Mint on. Whenever I booted it up it says something like "invalid partition perimeters" (or something to that extent). Eventually it will boot into the OS, but I cannot play my music files with anything! Cannot seem to re-partition the solid state drive and revamp it either, won't allow me to. Would have liked to, but recently I just tossed it into storage and bought another 2TB solid state drive. Won't be using Linux Mint anymore for my music laptop. An offline de-bloated Windows 7 with Foobar2000 will have to do. Kinda sad because I really was willing to try out something new but if it comes with the risk of ruining expensive harddrives that's not the risk I'm willing to take.
Create symbolic link: ln -s [target file] [name for the link]
Problem: Broken /etc/sudoers file Solution: Boot into a live environment and fix it from there. This obviously requires either physical access, but it almost always works, doesn’t care about what init system you have, and does not care about whether or not you have a root password. The general approach is relatively simple: 1)Prepare a live CD (or other boot media) that is compatible with the OS you are using (mostly, this just comes down to supporting the particular combination of storage drivers and filesystems needed to mount the root filesystem). 2) Boot the affected system using that boot media. 3) Mount the root filesystem of the affected system somewhere. 4) Edit and save the file. 5) Reboot. This kind of fix works because it completely sidesteps the access controls of the affected system, letting you do pretty much whatever you want. This level of unrestricted access to the system is part of why physical security is so important.
