Bug 139214

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3)
Gecko/20040922

Description of problem:
Bug #129528 seems to have been closed prematurely. Since I am unable
to reopen that, I'm submitting a new bug.

My situation is that I have a Thinkpad with FC2 installed. It also has
an XP partition. The XP partition was moved up to start at cylinder 33
using PartitionMagic so that I would have room for /boot below it, and
then shrunk to provide space for Linux above it.

Initially, I booted successfully off of a burn of the FC3/disk1 CD,
then popped it so that I could run an HTTP install. Loaded image2
successfully, clicked english/US in the obvious places, selected
workstation install, got to partitioning. Chose "automatically
partition" and "delete all linux partitions" and got the error
reported above by Jens Peterson, plus some additional lines indicating
that the failure was somewhere in the middle of trying to allocate a
root partition.

On the theory that this problem was somehow arising during partition
delete and re-create, I booted the CD as a rescue disk and
hand-deleted all of the existing linux partitions and tried again.
Same problem. I tried this both with and without the "review
partitions" button checked.

From here down, you should assume that all of my FC2 partitions are gone.

Unfortunately, this is all early enough in the GUI setup that kernel
console isn't up yet, so I re-tried using the text-mode install
(theory: get the partitions created and then I should be able to back
out and restart the GUI install so I can see what happens later). No
joy. Same bug message appears under text install when installing via
HTTP. The gist is that the attempt to allocate a root partition failed
under LVM.

Okay. I've seen weird stuff under HTTP install before, so I tried
doing the install from the local CD. Same error. Actually, that's kind
of a relief since I'm counting on using HTTP install on some other
machines.

Okay. One last thing seems worth a try. Went back to rescue mode, left
the eventual /boot partition in place but whacked the LVM (type 8e)
partition. Try "keep partitions and use existing free space". Same error.

Okay, so now I invoke disk druid by hand. At this point I see
something really suspicious. Disk druid believes that cylinders 1-22
contain an EXT3 partition, but it *also* believes that those cylinders
are free. This is definitely not promising, so I rebooted to delete
all linux partitions by hand and tried once again to use Disk Druid by
hand.

At this point I gave up and decided to go with Disk Druid by hand.
Problem: nobody has gotten around to updating the release notes link
on the fedora website -- it still points to the FC2 release notes. A
brief look at the release notes on the CD reveals that there are no
recommendations for specific partition sizes in sight. Poked around
with google and found something plausible in the way of partition
sizes.  Eventually decided that I should make /boot separate, give
eveything else to a PV, allocate a swap and a / and rearrange things
after installation.

Okay, so now I see some VERY suspicious behavior in disk druid. DD
sees the XP partition at cylinders 23-1647, bt it ALSO thinks that
cylinders 1-9922 are free. I create a small partition, which happens
to land before the XP partition, and now I see
NewPartition:Free:XP:Free as expected. Delete this new partition and
the expected Free:XP:Free appears. Now create LV of max allowable size
and it looks like the cylinders are plausible. Then attempt to
re-create /boot and give it all remaining space. DD won't use the low
space, choosing instead to eat into the space previously given to the
LVM PV. Delete that, select the front free space by hand, and used
EDIT to create the /boot partition where it needed to be.

It begins to smell to me like somebody may have "fixed" DiskDruid.
Fdisk clearly doesn't have any problems figuring out the partitioning
scheme.

On the unlikely chance that it matters, note that because this system
was rearranged with Partition Magic the partitions do not appear in
the partition table in the same order that they are layed out on the
disk. Not clear why/if this should matter, but there it is.


Since this bug causes total install failure, I recommend that it
should go to a severity high.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
Version on initial FC3 release CD 1

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See details in description

Actual Results:  FC3 cannot be installed using automatic partitioning.
Release notes insufficient to enable a confident hand-install because
needed partition sizes are undocumented.

Expected Results:  FC3 should have installed -- or at least made it
past the partitioning stage. :-)

Additional info:

I'm rating this high because inability to install amounts to loss of
use of a machine once the prior release has been whacked.