Any progress on installing FC7 on a SATA system?

Jim Cornette fc-cornette at insight.rr.com
Wed Jun 20 02:23:44 UTC 2007


kwhiskerz wrote:
> On June 19, 2007 04:14:00 David Timms wrote:
>> Etanisla Lopez-Ortiz wrote:
>>> What I have:
>>> home-brew with 1 SATA hard drive and 1 SATA optical drive
>>>
>>> What I don't have:
>>> FC7 installed
>>> (even after trying "linux askmethod all-ide-generic nodmraid")
>>>
> 
> I had a problem getting Rawhide, about 6 weeks before the release of Fedora 7, 
> as well as all of the 6.9x releases, installed. The installer refuse to work, 
> after the lengthy choosing of the packages and the installation failed.
> 
> I thought that this had something to do with changing from PATA to SATA. In my 
> case, it didn't.
> 
> What it was was that the partitions on my drives didn't ALL begin and end on 
> cylinder boundaries. I had to repartition every drive (well, two). Definitely 
> use parted (command line), as it follows the cylinder boundaries. Don't use 
> any other program, except fdisk to get the partition order back in order (if 
> you add a partition, then delete it, then add it again with a different size, 
> then parted will mix up the numbering).

I had the problem with one disk and it led to the installer failing. As 
you mentioned, deleting partitions with parted or fdisk (fc7 version or 
rawhide version) helped out to get the installer to work once the 
protected area was honored. I just had to remove the last partition on 
the disk and leave the first three primary partitions intact. Then 
making an extended on the later portion of the disk and then adding two 
partitions withing the extended partition allowed me to install F7 on 
the newly crated partitions. /boot was intact but reformatted since FC6 
was blasted (2nd primary). The /home (3rd primary) was left intact and 
no data was lost.

There is a bug filed with parameters to give to the installer to allow 
it to proceed instead of fault at an exception. The bug report was 
discussed when F7 was released but I do not recall the report or 
parameter to use.

You might be onto something about the partitioning of disks causing 
problems for others also.

> 
> It is a pain in the ass, but in my case, it was definitely worth the trouble. 
> All test disks I have tried since, including Live CDs and the official Fedora 
> 7 DVD, have worked flawlessly.

No problems after the disk was put into conformance. It also allowed me 
to be able to close two rawhide bug reports caused by the errors. 
Bugzilla is not good if no one catches on that another report could be 
your problem. There needs to be a better method to track reports and 
group problems. I am sure there are probably hundreds of reports minimal 
that are locked in no feedback or problem identity mode. Maybe an AI 
program that can learn as it sifts through the reports. :-)

Jim




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