upgrading dual boot fedora - partitions

tns1 tns1 at cox.net
Sun Feb 3 00:31:02 UTC 2008


I have a dual boot XP + FC3 I am upgrading to FC8. Problem is I don't 
remember all those partition mysteries, and I don't want to stomp my XP 
install. I don't care if I preserve any of my FC3 files, I just thought 
an upgrade might be safer than a fresh install.

When I started to 'upgrade', I got a warning about /dev/hda6 not being 
mountable and how I might have problems if I continued, so I quit. The 
FC8 installer docs mention there may be (new) problems with unlabeled 
partitions, and it does appear that several are not labeled:

/dev/hda1, label=none,    type ntfs,  ID 7,                     
cyl:       0 7564
/dev/hda2, label="/boot", type linux, ID 83,                  cyl: 7565 
7575
/dev/hda3, label="/",        type linux, ID 83,                  cyl: 
7576 10094
/dev/hda4, label=none,    type W95 ext'd LBA, ID f,    cyl:10095 10337
/dev/hda5, label=none,    type linux swap, ID 82,          cyl:10095 10229
/dev/hda6, label=none,    typeW95 FAT32 LBA, ID c, cyl:10230 10336

I know that the 1st partition is XP drive C, the next two are linux 
/boot and /. The 4th partition is of extended type, which I believe is 
split into the 5th and 6th partition. The 5th partition is linux swap, 
and I think the 6th partition was just the odd bytes left over after 
splitting everything up, and even though it shows up in XP as drive F it 
isn't really used.

I added volume labels in XP for partition 1 & 6, but it when I booted in 
FC3, it didn't make any difference as far as what $blkid and fdisk 
report. I guess volume labels are not the same as partition labels.

If I instead go down the path of a fresh install with FC8 and choose to 
make custom partition assignments, the installer shows me a table of 
what it thinks I have - very similar to what I get with $fdisk /dev/hda 
except the "start" and "end" numbers (cylinders?) are not the same.

For instance instead of
/dev/hda1 start 0 end 7564 as I posted above, the FC8 installer says
/dev/sda1 start 1 end 7120. The other partition numbers differ as well. 
Without knowing more about these numbers, it looks like the installer is 
going to mess up my XP partition simply because it has the math wrong on 
partition size. The installer shows the partition label fields but does 
not let me edit them.

So really three questions:
How would I add partition labels if I really needed to?
Do I really need to?
Why doesn't the installer report the same sizes as fdisk?





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