Old style fixed partitions in KS-- Anaconda bug??

[dwight at supercomputer.org]

You might try doing a `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1b count=1` and 
then rebooting, to zero out the partition table.  It sounds like 
there's a conflict between the kernels' view of the partition table 
and the subsequent repartitioning of the drive.

Hope that helps.

   -dwight-

On Monday 04 February 2008 01:43:32 pm Cris Rhea wrote:
> I'm trying to lay out disk partitions in a certain way--
> This has worked for years, but recently broke due either to
> a change in the way Kickstart works or a bug in Anaconda.
>
> I use sfdisk to lay out the drive in the %pre section:
>
> %pre
>
> sfdisk -uM /dev/sda <<EOF
> ,150,L
> ,,E
> ;
> ;
> ,512,L
> ,2048,S
> ,6000,L
> ,2048,L
> ,10000,L
> ,,L
> EOF
>
> (this works correctly)
>
> If I specify what goes where in the KS file:
>
> part /boot --fstype ext3 --onpart sda1
> part /tmp --fstype ext3 --onpart sda9
> part /var --fstype ext3 --onpart sda8
> part swap --onpart sda6
> part /local1 --fstype ext3 --onpart sda10
> part /usr --fstype ext3 --onpart sda7
> part / --fstype ext3 --onpart sda5
>
> Anaconda croaks with the following error:
>
> 15:27:41 CRITICAL: parted exception: Error: Error informing the
> kernel about modifications to partition /dev/sda5 -- Device or
> resource busy. This means Linux won't know about any changes you
> made to /dev/sda5 until you reboot -- so you shouldn't mount it or
> use it in any way before rebooting.
>
>
> Googling this error shows it popping up at various time (back to
> FC3 or so), but no solutions.
>
> This worked fine in CentOS 4.4 (RHEL4 u4), but broke in the next
> update (and is still broken in CentOS 5.1 [RHEL5 u1]).
>
> I could work around this in CentOS 4 by loading systems against an
> old 4.4 image, then applying all the updates to get to 4.6. I
> can't do this in 5, since it is broken for all releases...
>
> Is there better way to achieve what I'm doing or is this just
> an Anaconda bug that's making my life difficult? I don't see an
> advantage to moving everything to LVM for simple single-disk
> systems...
>
>
> Thanks--
>
> --- Cris
>
> PS: I have a couple Anaconda dumps if someone is interested...