Bug 6750

Summary:	can't tell installer how to order my partitions
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Jonathan Kamens <jik>
Component:	installer	Assignee:	Jay Turner <jturner>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1	CC:	jik, srevivo
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-11-05 17:38:25 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 Jonathan Kamens 1999-11-05 13:11:29 UTC

I have a 4Gb hard-drive with a 1Gb Windows NT partition at
the beginning of it.

I wanted to install RedHat 6.1 with a 16Mb boot partition
all the way at the end of the disk and then a 1Gb root
partition immediately preceding it.  I wanted to organize
the disk in this way so that if I decided to grow either the
NT or Linux partition later, there would be room to do so.

Neither the graphical nor the text installer would let me do
this.  Both of them reordered the partitions I specified to
suit their preferences.  Even when I attempted to create a
"filler" partition to move the / ad /boot partitions to the
end of the disk, the installer reordered the partitions to
put the / partition before the filler partition.

The partition tool in the installer should allow the user to
specify exactly where on the disk the partitions should go.
If this doesn't seem like a feature that will be of interest
to most users, then it should be hidden in an "advanced
mode" or something, but it should be there.

Comment 1 Jay Turner 1999-11-05 17:38:59 UTC

The feature that you are looking for is called fdisk and it is
available by performing an expert-mode installation (just type
"expert" at the boot prompt)  Keep in mind that most (read that 99%)
of Intel machine will not boot from beyond 1024 cylinders on a drive,
therefore your plan to put /boot at the end of a 4G drive will not
work at all.  You are probably going to end up having to put the 16M
/boot partition at the beginning of the drive and then doing whatever
you want with the root and swap partitions.