FC4t2 no good without LILO

[Dana Lacoste]

> > you can't run fdisk in the provided virtual terminal on alt-ctrl-f2 or
f3?
> > I could have sworn you had access to fdisk through the provided
> > virtual terminal.

> Yes, but then I can't select those partitions to install to.

To elaborate, here's what I went through (in case anyone cares)

I have XP installed.  I can't uninstall it because it would make running
InstallShield a lot harder (I do a lot of different projects :)

So I resized my NTFS and did some non-IT-supported messing around to make
space for my Linux install.

I install FC4.

It sees my partition table fine.  The partition table is in LBA mode (255
heads)
and FC4 requires that I select a partition in Disk Druid to install to.

I create a new partition, install away, reboot, grub works fine, linux works
fine,
but XP won't boot any more.

Turns out that it won't boot because when Disk Druid re-wrote the partition
table,
it did it in the old way (16 heads, huge number of cylinders instead of 255
heads,
smaller cylinders.  I forget which one is which, but the difference between
"Large"
and "LBA" in old BIOS's [not selectable on new thinkpads])

I decide to continue testing to find a way around this: the answer is that
there
is none: the installer won't let you select an existing partition (empty) to
install
to, and disk druid trashes the partition table.  the only way around that is
to
add an "hda=cyl,sec,heads" boot parameter.

I did this, it's working, no complaints (well, nothing major ;)

Asking for anything but disk druid to be used would be silly, I think we
could all
agree, but sfdisk and fdisk and the rescue CD I used to resize NTFS
(qt-parted) all
worked fine.

This is directly analogous to the grub vs. lilo debate.  It's not that I
can't
make it work, it's that the default install will just simply not work on
existing
hardware configurations that aren't unusual.  If it was quirky hardware,
sure,
if it was an obscure request, sure, but neither of those was true, it just
didn't
work for me (and I ended up reinstalling XP and FC4 before I found out the
"trick"
of how to make it work.)

Dana "trying to be helpful" Lacoste