My Dell laptop came with W10. I turned off secure boot, repartitioned and installed Chakra Linux. W10 would no longer boot but that's not an issue for me, as Chakra worked fine. Later on I tried to install W7 but that failed as well because I couldn't get drivers from Dell. Again Chakra worked fine. Finally I decided to recover the drive space from the NTFS partition, which KDE Parition Manager did and I installed the latest Chakra and again it works fine.

Except during boot and before Grub I get the message "Invalid partition table!" I press enter, Grub starts and boots into Chakra which as I've said, runs fine.

I'd like to eliminate the "Invalid partition table!" error. How do I do that?

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xaec3eb1c

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 1953499135 1953497088 931.5G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1953499136 1953520064 20929 10.2M 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Some BIOS implementations get upset if the boot drive does not have one partition marked "active" (bootable) in the partition table. Yours does not. Actually, I'm surprised it would boot at all without that with a BIOS that cares, so that night not be your problem.

Some solutions here:

http://en.community.dell.com/support...518/t/19469208

Those are all people who have reinstalled the system and have confused their SS drives with their physical drives. That is not my problem and all their solutions are Windows based that won't work with my Linux drives.

That might be the problem, but I think I'll have to wipe and load to set a drive as active. I don't see the option in KDE Partition Manager either. I'll have to save this for later when I have more time.

You just use fdisk's "a" command the toggle the "bootable" flag for one partition.

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That's not the way I read it. The solutions are BIOS-based and DELL BIOS-specific, related to the boot sequence. But if you've looked at the relevant BIOS settings then fair enough.

Since the laptop came with Windows 10 and had Secure Boot and stuff, it is certainly UEFI. But when you installed Chakra the last time, you made the partition table MBR (indicated by "dos" there). So, the laptop is running UEFI but sees an MBR hard disk and tells you that it is invalid since it should be working with GPT.

From what I read, Chakra Linux can install in UEFI mode, so, if you can afford it, repartition your hard disk with GPT and make an EFI partition ~ 500MB at the beginning, then you make your other partitions and install Chakra again.

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That's a good call. Do you reckon UEFI auto switches to Legacy BIOS mode when the Enter key is pressed after the error message?

Yes, it probably does that as it detects the hard disk partition table to be MBR.

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This Dell5558 does have UEFI, and I have turned on legacy boot and secure boot off. One of the reasons I reinstalled Chakra was to recover the disc space W10 left behind. It will be awhile before I get the time to do this, also the Chakra Wiki is down. Thanks for the help.

I just encountered this issue today on my Latitude e6330. I never had to set the bootable flag before. Setting my root partition as the bootable partition fixed my issue.

Although Linux and the GRUB boot loader don't care about the "active" (bootable) flag, some BIOS implementations will not consider a drive to be a boot candidate unless it contains a partition with that flag set.

Well the solution was to enable UEFI in the Bios, reinstall W10, shrink it down, and reinstall Chakra with the boot loader in GPT. My mistake was thinking I could turn this laptop into a Linux only. I still think it's possible, just don't have the time to keep trying things out and reloading this system.

why are you using old partition table?

you can run it linux only, if you e.g. have the knowledge, use a proper distro, or follow the gentoo handbook, or change settings uefi + no windows + keep partitoin table old

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it would also help not using a newbie distro, but something proper. or get the knowledge. or use a proper distro which explains every step involved. or read the necessary posts. afaik there are at least 3 distros which explain in details what is involved.

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i also remember times when the user needed a brain to install windows 2000, 95 and such. the preshipped computers with windows made matters worse in any aspect