FC2 ate my system+ RANT

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 09:45:36AM -0500, Satish Balay wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 26 May 2004, Roy Brown wrote:
> 
> >Well, it looks like I hit the dreaded dual-boot bug.  I hadn't realized it 
> >affected Win2K in addition to WinXP.  After failing to boot into my 
> >Windows partition, I decided to give up on FC2.  I tried reinstalling my 
> >previous Linux (Libranet 2.8) in the hope that it would fix the broken 
> >boot stuff.  No luck.  Then I tried a "repair" with Windows...failure.  
> >Then I tried to reinstall Windows from scratch (including deleting all 
> >partitions)...failure. Any ideas what to try next?  I just want a working 
> >Windows system again.  I didn't see anything about LBA mode in my BIOS 
> >options (Albatron MB with i845PE chipset).
> >
> >PS: this is an amazingly bad bug to let into a release.  Is there going to 
> >be a "fixed" version of FC2?  I would have thought that a bug this bad 
> >would have warranted pulling the release until it was fixed.  It doesn't 
> >just not install, it screws up your system.  Was this problem in FC2T3 or 
> >was it introduced in the final release?
> 
> You might want to check:
> 
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-May/msg00908.html
> 
> Satish
I went to the web site and the description of this problem is
unbelievable. I can't see how if someone knew about it it was not
fixed. When FC2 is installed it changes the geometry recorded for your
disk. For example, if you started with 255 heads configured it is
changed to 16. The fix is easy unless you don't know that is 
happening because then you would go crazy trying to find out.
Now even the fix which they say is easy depends on your knowing how
many heads you originally had. Do you know that for all your disks? I
don't. If you don't know that there is no way to recover from this
bug. So to say the recovery is easy as the RedHat message does is
certainly very deceptive. 
Well there is my rant for the day.
-- 
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
One Trinity Place.
San Antonio, TX 78212-7200

telephone: (210)-999-7484
email:akonstam at trinity.edu