FC1 -> FC2 upgrade problem...

Mike Cisar mlists at starmania.net
Sun Jul 18 00:40:40 UTC 2004


> > Being software RAID, I broke the mirror, zero-filled the 
> drive, jotted 
> > down the CHS information the maxtor utility returned (32xxx/16/63), 
> > verified that these were the same numbers the system bios 
> was seeing 
> > on auto-detect, hard coded them onto the kernel command 
> line just to 
> > be sure.  Then went in with fdisk and created a partition structure 
> > and then re-added the newly partitioned drive into the 
> mirror.  Once 
> > that was complete, I repeated the same process on the other 
> of the two drives.

> Per your description above you are using the physical CHS 
> configuration on the drives.
> 
> As has been noted many times on this list, anaconda as used 
> in FC2 wants the LBA configuration for the drives.
> 
> I would expect that this is really the issue and that you 
> might look at http://www.fedorafaq.org/#nodualboot .

I've looked at the dual boot notes in a number of different places this was
what led me to wipe and repartition the drives in the first place (under the
assumption that on a blank drive, FC2 would be smart enough to create
whatever partition structure was valid for itself... apparently not).

- The Maxtor utility shows both drives as 39703/16/63
- The BIOS autodetects both drives as 39703/16/63 and shows that LBA is
enabled

Here's where things get odd... if I force the CHS on the kernel command line
I get the following...

[root at server1 var]# cat hda/geometry
physical     39703/16/63
logical      39703/16/63
[root at server1 var]# cat hdc/geometry
physical     39703/16/63
logical      39703/16/63

But if I don't force it I get this...

[root at server1 var]# cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry
physical     39703/16/63
logical      2491/255/63
[root at server1 var]# cat /proc/ide/hdc/geometry
physical     39703/16/63
logical      39703/16/63

Note the difference in logical parameters on hda only.  Interesting I think,
so I pulled the drives and swapped them around (primary to secondary,
secondary to primary controller), fully expecting hdc to show up as
2491/255/63... but it didn't, hda did.

I tried...
[root at server1 sbin]# ./sfdisk -d /dev/hda | ./sfdisk --no-reread -H255
/dev/hda

But I get...

Disk /dev/hda: 2491 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Old situation:
Warning: The partition table looks like it was made
  for C/H/S=*/16/63 (instead of 2491/255/63).
For this listing I'll assume that geometry.
Units = cylinders of 516096 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0


Does this mean that I need to zero fill hda again and partition it as
2491/16/63 and leave hdc as 39703/16/63 to make FC2 happy?  I don't mind
repartitioning again, but how can I be 100% sure of what geometry FC2 is
going to be looking for so that it'll be happy with the result.

>>>>> Mike <<<<<






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