Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Timothy Murphy]

William Hooper wrote:

>> I wanted to re-organise my partitions
>> while keeping hda1 which has Windows-XP on it.
> 
> Could you explain a bit more?  I've had no trouble with Disk Druid and
> dual booting.

First of all, these problems occurred on a Sony Picturebook (C1VFK)
on which I never succeeded in getting Fedora installed using CDs
with the standard Sony CD51 reader.

I finally got it installed by first installing SuSE-8.0
(I had an old set of CDs someone gave me a couple of years ago.)
This installed without problem,
and I then brought over the Fedora-3 ISOs by WiFi
and installed it from the hard disk.

Before anyone suggests this, I did try responding to the boot prompt
with "linux pci=off ide1=0x180,0x386" as suggested in the Release Notes
but this caused a kernel panic.
I also tried at least 12 different versions, 
eg "linux text ide2=0x180,0x386",
but none of these worked.
Some (such as the above) allowed me to install the first CD,
but then anaconda bombed out while trying to eject the CD.

I don't believe it is possible to install Fedora-3 on this laptop from CDs,
though I will try any method suggested.

I also could not see how one could install over the network,
as there is only one PCMCIA slot, and it seemed the CD had to be in place
while trying to install from another computer.

I did consider taking the hard disk out, and installing on a desktop,
and would have done that if SuSE (or Knoppix) had not installed.
 
>> I couldn't see any way to do
>> this with Disk Druid, so I had to start Knoppix, and run fdisk under
>> that.
> 
> Why not just boot the Fedora disk in rescue mode?

Sadly, I have more confidence that Knoppix will boot without problem
(as it did) than I have that any version of Fedora will -
on this machine with this CD drive.
But I probably could have used the Fedora rescue CD (which I burned)
rather than Knoppix.

I had - and usually do have - a pretty clear idea
of what partitions I want,
and it is my experience that Disk Druid has its own idea
of how one should partition the disk.
The disk I was using (I just installed it) 
had some partitions on it already,
and I couldn't see any way to delete them with Disk Druid.
Is there a way?

Incidentally, during this long saga I also tried installing Redhat-8.0,
as I thought (mistakenly) that I had installed this on my laptop before.
In any case, I got as far as the choice of Disk Druid and fdisk,
and chose the latter,
and was interested to see that it had exactly the same
graphical interface for choosing mount points etc as Disk Druid.
So as far as I can see, fdisk was exactly like Disk Druid
except that one could do things with fdisk
that one could not do with Disk Druid.

I don't know why Knoppix and SuSE are so much better
at installation on this computer.
In fact I have never found a computer that Knoppix znd SuSE
did not install on.
(I have a SCSI-only machine which the Fedora-3 kernel failed on.)


 

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland