error updating irrelevant partition during FC5 install

[Joel Rees]

On 2006/06/12, at 13:19, Jeff Vian wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 08:00 +0900, Joel Rees wrote:
>> I kept getting an error while trying to install FC5 on a system with
>> an on-board ATA controller and a second ATA controller card  
>> plugged in.
>>
>> I'd get through the screens for selecting packages and go to do the
>> actual format, and get a message to the effect of
>>
>>      hda4 cannot be updated. changes will not take effect until  
>> reboot.
>>
>> Then I'd get the option to show the nice, helpful debug screen, but,
>> particularly considering the point in the install, no way to save
>> that long, arcane block of stack dump and whatnot (and I'm not going
>> to type it in by hand). The only option besides viewing the debug
>> dump is reboot, with the disk untouched.
>>
>> With the partitions I was cutting, hda4 should not have been updated
>> anyway. Root went into hda1, I had the FC5 LVM volume in hda2, and I
>> was leaving the old FC3 file system (sans root) in hda3 (Extravagant,
>> I know, but I'm not into keeping movies on that 160G hard disk yet,
>> so it seems reasonable to just keep it around for a while.), and
>> leaving freeBSD in hda4 for the time being.
>>
> You are only allowed 4 actual partitions.

4 BIOS level partitions, yes. That's why I've made hda2 (and hda3,  
two years ago) LVM, so I can cut the operating partitions finer  
(separate partitions for /var/log and /var/www and such).

> If you want more, then hda4
> would need to be an extended partition with logical partitions inside
> it.

Not really, since freebsd has its own scheme for slicing BIOS  
partitions. (FC actually recognizes freebsd slices, incidentally.)

> That may be the issue you are seeing.

Negative. The partitioning software in the installer (still disk  
druid?) should not be touching hda4 at all.

> If hda4 is not an extended
> partition then anaconda/disk druid may be complaining because it does
> not see the expected type of partition there.

Possible, but I doubt it. freebsd partitions (and slices) are not  
exactly strange to the developers.

Besides, why would it complain when I use two controllers and  
allocate to the end of hda2, but not when I use only one controller  
(primary/secondary channels), and not when I leave a little space  
(LVM-)unallocated at the end of hda2?

>> After some playing around, I left a little unused space at the end of
>> the LVM

(... I should have said, the LVM allocations in hda2, ...)

>> once and was able to proceed to the format and install (and
>> am proceeding with the updates now, man they sure take a while). I
>> was also able to do an install with one controller only (the one on
>> the motherboard).
>>
>> I've been off-list for a while, so if this has come up before, I
>> apologize for the noise. I'm not sure what to look this up under on
>> bugzilla, since I don't remember the exact wording of the message.

But thanks for giving the problem some thought and helping think a  
little further about how to check bugzilla for it.