Bug 188579

Summary:	anaconda clearpart command no longer deletes all partitions silently
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Rick Kornfeld <rkornfeld>
Component:	anaconda	Assignee:	Chris Lumens <clumens>
Status:	CLOSED NEXTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.0	CC:	atodorov
Target Milestone:	beta
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2008-04-30 18:54:14 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 Rick Kornfeld 2006-04-11 13:58:59 UTC

Description of problem:
In RH3 using Kick start ks.cfg you were able to use the clearpart --all --
initlabel command to silently clear,clean, delete ALL existing partitions from 
the server without user intervention. This allowed us to boot to a CD then walk 
away until the Kickstart process was over and the server rebooted.

When we started to develop RH4 using Update 3 also Kickstart and the clearpart -
-all --initlabel, we noticed that the first time the server built all the 
partitions were deleted and it worked fine, however, the second time we built 
the same server we received Python - anaconda errors at kickstart time saying 
the install could not create a LVM PV because there was no space. Upon 
rebooting we continued to get the same error. We then recreated the ks.cfg file 
and removed the --initlabel option from the clearpart statement. After 
rebooting and each additional time we re-built the server, instead of getting 
the Python error we received a nice GUI interface asking us if we would like to 
clear all the partitions off the server. When we answered yes the installation 
continued without incident. Again, each subsequent time we rebuild the same 
server the nice GUI interface came up and asked us if we wanted to delete all 
the partitions. Again, answering yes allowed the installation to proceed 
without problems. The issue is we can NO LONGER build these servers silently. A 
user must stay at the server side until they can answer yes to the delete all 
partitions GUI question. Is this a bug or are we missing some option to the 
clearpart command to allow us silent installs (user free) like we did in RH3?

Thanks



Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
RH 4 Update 3 - This is the first version of RH 4 we used. We have no knowledge 
if the clearpart command acted any different in RH4 Update 1 or 2

How reproducible:
Each subsequent time we rebuild the same server we get the error

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use clearpart --all --initlabel in the ks.cfg (This produces the Python 
cannot create LVM error on all rebuilds,re-installs of RH4 U3 of the same 
server AFTER the initial build)
2. Replace with clearpart --all in the ks.cfg (This produces the delete 
partitions GUI on all rebuilds,re-installs of RH4 U3 of the same server AFTER 
the initial build)

3.
  
Actual results:
Python error in anaconda

Expected results:
Allow silent user free installation with ks.cfg

Additional info:

Comment 1 Chris Lumens 2006-06-05 18:26:24 UTC

*** Bug 188580 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2 Need Real Name 2006-06-08 20:21:06 UTC

I've been seeing a related behavior on our kickstart installs.  We don't use the
default LVM layouts, rather we choose to specify the partition scheme ourselves.
What happens during the install (on some of our machines which are all HP
DL360/DL380's) is the label applied to the filesystems gets a "1" appended to it. 
The /etc/fstab is correctly contructed though. The workaround is to fix the
labels manually, but that is clearly not acceptable long term.

Sounds like this could be related to the above problem.

Comment 3 Chris Lumens 2007-03-22 15:09:42 UTC

I can't reproduce this with RHEL4u4.  Perhaps there's something specific to your
kickstart file that's causing the problem.  Assuming you are still seeing this
problem on RHEL4u4, can you please attach the partitioning-specific portion of
your kickstart file to this bug report?

Comment 4 Rick Kornfeld 2007-04-13 20:33:37 UTC

clearpart --all --initlabel

Comment 5 Chris Lumens 2007-05-10 14:49:12 UTC

Please test against the next update release of RHEL4 and let me know if this is
still broken for you.  If so, please attach your complete kickstart file and a
screenshot or the exact text of the error message you're seeing.  Also,
/tmp/anaconda.log from the installation would be helpful.  Thanks.

Comment 11 Joel Andres Granados 2008-04-21 12:06:19 UTC

*** Bug 443372 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13 Alexander Todorov 2008-04-21 13:11:27 UTC

Entire text screen:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (C) 2004 Red Hat, Inc.                              
                                                                                
                                                                                
             +--------------------+ Warning +--------------------+              
             |                                                   |              
             | /dev/sda contains GPT signatures, indicating      |              
             | that it has a GPT table.  However, it does not    |              
             | have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it    |              
             | should.  Perhaps it was corrupted - possibly by   |              
             | a program that doesn't understand GPT partition   |              
             | tables.  Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table,    |              
             | and are now using an msdos partition table.  Is   |              
             | this a GPT partition table?                       |              
             |                                                   |              
             |         +-----+                  +----+           |              
             |         | Yes |                  | No |           |              
             |         +-----+                  +----+           |              
             |                                                   |              
             |                                                   |              
             +---------------------------------------------------+              
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
  <Tab>/<Alt-Tab> between elements   |  <Space> selects   |  <F12> next screen

Comment 15 Alexander Todorov 2008-04-21 13:21:31 UTC

From the docs:

--initlabel

    * Initializes the disk label to the default for your architecture (for
example msdos for x86 and gpt for Itanium). It is useful so that the
installation program does not ask if it should initialize the disk label if
installing to a brand new hard drive. 

I can see the bug only when clearpart --all --initlabel is specified.
If --initlabel is omitted then I can't see the bug.

Comment 16 Chris Lumens 2008-04-21 14:50:05 UTC

Alexander - if you could grab http://people.redhat.com/clumens/188579.img, test
it out, and post the log files to that bug it would be helpful.  Note that
updates= is not supported in RHEL4.

Comment 17 Alexander Todorov 2008-04-21 16:08:22 UTC

Chris,
with your updates.img everything seems fine. I can proceed further and then I
hit bug #443373 so I can't complete the install.

Comment 18 Chris Lumens 2008-04-22 08:21:27 UTC

Alexander - this tells me that your GPT issue is being caused by the dispatch
traceback you can see in your log files that Martin committed a fix for.  I
included that in the updates image just to make sure you didn't hit another
issue at the same time.  So your problem there should be solved already.  We
just need to do a new build.