Bug 101272

Summary:	clearpart doesn't work in kickstart, going interactive when liberating Windows boxes
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Chris Ricker <chris.ricker>
Component:	parted	Assignee:	Matt Wilson <msw>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	9
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-06-25 19:21:03 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Chris Ricker 2003-07-30 15:32:03 UTC

I've got a room of machines here this week that I'm working with. All at one
time had Windows installed on them. When I kickstart them using a ks.cfg file
with the following partitioning info:

zerombr yes
clearpart --all
part swap --size 512
part /boot --size 75
part / --size 3072 --grow --maxsize 10000

the install cannot be done non-interactively. anaconda insists on displaying the
following warning:

The partition table on /dev/hda is inconsistent. There are many reasons why this
 might be the case. Often, the reason is that Linux detected the BIOS geometry i
ncorrectly. However, this does not appear to be the case here. It is safe to ign
ore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders, and may c
ause problems with FAT file systems. Using LBA is recommended.

I would expect the clearpart --all to shut this up, but it doesn't....

The partition table as seen from VC 2 of anaconda is:


Disk /tmp/hda: 20.5 GB, 20547841536 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2498 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/tmp/hda1   *         1       511   4104576    7  HPFS/NTFS
/tmp/hda2           512      2498  15960577+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/tmp/hda5           512      2498  15960546    7  HPFS/NTFS


After install, I've got


Disk /dev/hda: 20.5 GB, 20547841536 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2498 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1        10     80293+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            11      1284  10233405   83  Linux
/dev/hda3          1285      1349    522112+  82  Linux swap

the geometry's the same in both cases, so the warning looks bogus and it keeps
me from doing unattended upgrades needlessly....

Comment 1 Michael Fulbright 2003-07-30 16:41:23 UTC

The warning is caused by the parted library.

You can just 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

in your %pre if you want to just clear the partition table.

Comment 2 Chris Ricker 2003-07-30 16:51:14 UTC

Right, and dd'ing 447 - 512 on the disc in the %pre does eliminate the message,
but I shouldn't have to do that b/c I have clearpart. AFAICT, the clearpart
statement does nothing.

Or else am I misunderstanding what clearpart does?

Comment 3 Jeremy Katz 2004-06-25 19:21:03 UTC

clearpart won't change the geometry detected by the kernel and having
this mismatch can be problematic.  Of course, the whole problem turns
into something wildly different (see bug 115825) in 2.6.