Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 18:28 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 24 January 2005 17:28, Jeff Vian wrote:
> >On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 15:31 -0600, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 01:00:04PM -0500, William Hooper wrote:
> >> > Timothy Murphy said:
> >> > > Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
> >> > >> Fdisk has never been removed. It has always been availible
> >> > >> for people who want more control over their partitioning than
> >> > >> Disk Druid provides.
> >> > >
> >> > > What you are saying is that there is a secret code known to
> >> > > experts for doing this.
> >> >
> >> > Again, the "secret code" is the standard keystroke for changing
> >> > virtual terminals.
> >> >
> >> > [snip]
> >> >
> >> > > If you tell them
> >> > > that something is dangerous you should assume that they have
> >> > > heard you, and will either take care or else avoid that method
> >> > > altogether.
> >> >
> >> > Unfortunately this isn't the case.  As a real-world example:
> >> > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2003-July/msg00
> >> >574.html
> >> >
> >> > > Incidentally, to the many people who have told me
> >> > > I should have used Ctr-Alt-F2 rather than Alt-F2,
> >> > > I actually explained at one point that I was installing in
> >> > > text mode, as the X that comes with Fedora does not run
> >> > > properly on my Sony Picturebook (C1VFK).
> >> > > But Alt-F2 did not work for me either.
> >> >
> >> > WORKSFORME.  Perhaps your hardware has issues changing virtual
> >> > terminals?
> >>
> >> Ok. if you are going from X to an alternate terminal you have to
> >> type ALT- CTL- Fx . To back to X or another terminal then ALT - Fx
> >> is enough. F7 usually represents the X terminal. In a text install
> >> F1 and F2 will surfice. I just did this a week ago and I think F2
> >> will take you out of the text install and F1 take you back to the
> >> install. At worst I have the F1 and F2 reversed. But that
> >> certainly works. -------------------------------------------
> >
> >Exactly my point.
> >
> >It seems Gene and others would like fdisk as one of the options
> > during the install instead of *forcing* all those who have no clue
> > about getting to a shell (Shall we say newbies) to use only the one
> > tool someone has deemed safe (DD) or allowing it to autopartition. 
> > Both of which choose their own way of organizing the partitons, and
> > it seems to me that autopartitioning uses LVM (in addition to
> > destroying existing partitions), which may not be ideal for some.
> >
> >What I do not understand is why choices are being removed from menus
> > and hidden.  I thought this was about freedom to choose, as well as
> > making it attractive and easy for new users.
> 
> Very well said, Jeff.  And to illustrate a similar problem, I've made 
> 5 (unsuccessfull) passes at installing BDI-Live-RC46 again today, on 
> a seperate hard drive in this same machine, which uses cfdisk as its 
> partitioning tool.  Its a little bit better than DD in my opinion, 
> but its still flakey.  In 5 installs, only one run would allow me to 
> set /dev/hda1 as the /boot partition, the other 4 refused to show me 
> anything in the primary partition camp, starting at /dev/hda5 in its 
> pulldown choices.  It looks as if one could type his answer into the 
> box as the cursor can be placed there, but if focused on the text 
> bos, it appears the keyboard is disabled.  At any rate, going after 
> it with your favorite bug swatter would seem to be a pretty good 
> idea, particularly if it can be made a bit more intuitive to run.
> 
> The lack of success is the installer script is not apparently setting 
> its paths correctly, so when it comes time to setup the root and 
> user, all of those useradd/groupadd/chpasswd etc tools aren't being 
> found, so the passwd and group files are not being updated.  So on 
> the reboot to actually run it, no passwords are recognized and you 
> are locked out from logging in forever.  And it seems rather 
> self-explanatory that you cannot get a great amount of work out of a 
> machine you cannot run.

Although I support you on the request for fdisk to be back in the
installer as an option, the rest of your problems has me stumped.

I have never had the sort of problem you report with any hardware
combination I have used.  That leads me to believe you may have
something that is actually hardware related that pops up its ugly head
during the install and hides otherwise.

Some of the items you have related seem possibly power, memory or MB
related.

1. Have you run memtest86 on this machine - deepest and most extreme
test it has - for at least 24 hours?

2. Have you done an identical install on different hardware?  Just to
rule out the intermittent or conditional hardware issue?

3. What are you using as a power supply?  I know that some power
supplies work perfectly *except* in some cases.  I had one machine that
gave me intermittent hangs/reboots with nothing to indicate the reason.
I finally gave in and tried a different power supply and the problem
disappeared.  Power supplies that are marginal on the power/voltages can
give weird results in the fringe cases.  Athalon CPUs are known to be
especially sensitive to that.

Hope this gives you some things to try and consider.
Jeff