Bug 190142

Description of problem:
Installing Fedora on one drive of a two drive system causes the partition table
of the second drive to be changed.  The first drive contains a Windows partition
and partitions for the and I install FC to that drive.  There are no linux
partitions on this second drive and I donât create any during the install. 
After the FC4 installation the geometry on the second hard drive is changed. 
One side effect is that the partition table changes written by Fedora are seen
as errors by partition magic (under windows).


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
Final production release of FC4

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Record partition table info on both hard drives
2.  Install Fedora Core 4 to the first hard drive
3.  Recheck partition table info on both hard drives
  
Actual results:
After each install, the start head/sectors values were changed in the partition
table on the second hard drive.

Expected results:
Fedora to not touch the second hard drives partition table at all. 

Additional info:
Back in 2004 I tried FC2 and it gave the same problem (albeit using a different
hard drive).  I waited until FC4 before trying again â  but it seems the problem
is still present.
I thought that this may be related to the CHS bug
(http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/ ) but (a) this bug is supposed to be closed and
(b) the partition table is still changed even when I specify the CHS geometry.

The problem seems to be limited to Fedora - I have tried a minimal Ubuntu (5.1)
install and a SuSE 10.0 installation - neither modified the partition table on
either drive (other than changing the currently bootable partition).


My Setup
I have two drives, one is a small (1.5Gb) HD connected to the motherboards IDE
second channel as a slave. This is formatted with a small primary FAT partition
and an extended partition containing a small Linux swap partition and the rest
is formatted as Ext2.  The BIOS is set for LBA for this drive.

The second drive is a 160Gb drive with multiple partitions (a FAT16 pri (DOS), a
FAT32 pri (Win98), an NTFS logical, three FAT and several FAT32 logical
partitions). This is connected to an ATA PCI card (Highpoint driverocket 133SB).
This has no way to set/change LBA access - the manufactures documentation says
it supports LBA48.

Both drives have XOSL on the MBR and were formatted with Partition Magic. 

I installed Fedora (minimal install), selecting manual partitioning & selecting
the preformatted Ext2 as the root mount point & told it not to reformat.  I put
GRUB in the root partition (except for the test when I omitted installing GRUB)


Results
After the install and adding Fedora to the XOSL menu, Fedora booted up ok. 

The installation of FC4 does not change the partition table of the (small) drive
to which FC4 was installed (/dev/hdd). However, it changed the partition table
of the large (160Gb) hard drive (/dev/hdg).   (As checked by running the
partinfo tool under DOS from a floppy).

The changes to the large hard drive started at the first EPBR (extended
partition boot record in partition magic terminology â itâs the second partition
table entry for each logical partition, the pointer to the next logical
partition) in the extended partition - that and all subsequent EPBRs had the
start head/sector entries changed from [Head 0, Sector 1] to [Head 254, Sector 63].
Booting into Windows (or DOS) and running Partition magic gave error 116 (LBA
and CHS values not equal). 

I have tried this several times:
â¢	without specifying the disk geometry;
â¢	specifying geometry as reported by fdisk -l for both drives (viz. "linux
hdd=787,64,63 hdg=19457,255,63");
â¢	specified geometry as "linux hdd=787,64,64 hdg=19457,255,64â
â¢	specified the 1.5Gb drive as reported by fdisk -l and specified 160Gb drive as
its true physical geometry as determined by the drive manufacturers (Western
Digital) s/w (viz. "linux hdd=787,64,63 hdg=310101,16,63")
â¢	Without installing GRUB and specifying geometry as reported by fdisk âl
("linux hdd=787,64,63 hdg=19457,255,63â)

After each install, the start head/sectors were changed on the large hard drive
as described above. 

Iâve attached 3 files showing the partition tables:

Initial.txt â The initial state before each linux installation.
FC4_4.txt â The state of the partitions after installing FC4 and Specifying CHS
parameters for BOTH drives as reported by fdisk -l.  i.e. "linux hdd=787,64,63
hdg=19457,255,63"
Ubu.txt â The state of the partitions after installing Ubuntu 5.1