Bug 933

Summary: Disk Druid will not create more than one primary partition
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Adam Thompson <athompso>
Component: installerAssignee: David Lawrence <dkl>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 5.2   
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: 1999-02-05 23:57:11 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:

Description Adam Thompson 1999-01-23 21:33:39 UTC 
Disk Druid cannot (so far as I can tell) be forced to
create PRIMARY partitions.  The first partition on the
drive becomes /dev/hda1, but hda2,hda3,hda4 are always
skipped.  The next partition is always hda5, which is some
bizarre MSDOS-extended-partition-like scheme.

This is confusing for long-time users of Linux, but can be
REALLY bad in a system that dual-boots between RH5.2 and
some other Linux system.

Additionally, Partition Magic seems to get confused by
this scheme.  (Although -- Partition Magic seems confused
in general, by this computer :-).

I realize that this is more "flexible" for people who don't
fully understand partitioning, or who don't have experience
reformatting hard disks :-)  but for such an otherwise
pretty installer, I'd like to be able to get rid of fdisk.
However, I like primary partitions.  Period.
Comment 1 David Lawrence 1999-02-05 23:57:59 UTC 
Thanky you for your suggestion. It will be considered for the next
release of Red Hat Linux. Until then we have left fdisk available for
people who want more flexibility on how they want their partitions
setup. Disk druid attempts to hide the specifics from the general
user. It is causing problems with other partitioning utilities which
does not happen with fdisk then we of course would like to know abou
that.