Disk Drud Warning

[Robert Nichols]

vinod gullu wrote:
> I am having Mandrake 10.1 and Windows XP installed on
> My Laptop. Now I want to switch over to Fedora Core.
> But when i am trying to install Fedora: AT the disk
> partitioning step a warning message appears (both with
> manual partitioning as well as with automatic
> partitioning):
> 
>  " The partition table on device hda was unreadable.
> To create new partition it must be initialized,
> causing the loss of all data on this drive."
> 
>  after pressing "NO" Next message comes:
> 
>   "No valid devices were found on which create to new
> filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause
> of this problem"
> 
> My disk partitions are as follows:
>           Boot Start End       Blocks       Id  System
> /dev/hda1       1     654      5253233+     12 Compaq Diagnostics
> /dev/hda2  *    4480  6391     15358140     7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda3       655   7296     53351865     f  W95 EXT'd(LBA)
> /dev/hda5       655   785      1052226      82 Linux Swap
> /dev/hda6       786   1422     5116671      83 Linux
> /dev/hda7       1423  4479     24555321     83 Linux
> /dev/hda8       6392  7296     5116671      83 Linux

You have illegal, overlapping partitions.  Your second primary
partition, /dev/hda2, is in the middle of your extended partition,
/dev/hda3.  I don't know how you managed to persuade a partitioning
tool to create that structure, but you will have to correct that
problem before Disk Druid will accept your partition table as
valid.

There is no clean way to do that without physically moving
partitions.  There is a somewhat ugly solution of re-defining
hda3 to be from cyl 655 to 4479, re-create hda5, hda6, and hda7
in their existijg locations, and create a new primary partition
hda4 from cyl 6392 to cyl 7296 to replace the current hda8.
The ugly parts are that the partitions will not be in disk order
(I'm not certain that Disk Druid will accept that), and if
you want to preserve the contents of the current hda8 you'll
have to play some games in fdisk's "expert" mode to adjust the
start of data for the new hda4.

-- 
Bob Nichols         Yes, "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.