When I try to use the partitioning tool in Red Hat Linux 9.0.93 to perform a new installation, it complains there is not enough free space to make the partition. It seems the hard drive's physical size is not correctly detected, as it is 80 GB, but the partioning tool thinks it's about 2 GB. Mainboard: ASUS A7N8X nForce 2 Disk controller: Silicon Image SiI3112A Disk drive: Seagate 80 GB SATA I'll post exact details (BIOS settings, reported physical size, etc.) if required.
Could you grab /tmp/syslog from the installer and attach it?
After reporting this bug, I started a Gentoo Linux installation, and was able to successfully read this hard drive and create disk partitions using fdisk from the Gentoo boot CD. Disk Druid is able to display these partitions, but I'm not sure if it can manage them properly.
Created attachment 94544 [details] /tmp/syslog just before starting the partitioning tool I have attached /tmp/syslog that was copied before I started the partitioning tool. It shows the relevant boot messages (you will notice the hard drive is /dev/hde).
Created attachment 94545 [details] disk partition layout on my system I have attached my partition layout (fdisk -l /dev/hde) so you can see the reported disk geometry, the partitions that Disk Druid should see fine, and the partitions that I am attempting to install on.
Once Disk Druid displays these partitions, I edit the partition /dev/hde5 to tell the installer it must format the disk as ext3 (for some reason it defaulted to not formatting it) and to mount it as "/". After doing so, the installer proceeds to format the partition (message is something like "Creating new filesystem on /"), but hangs at 11% complete (no hard disk activity for over a minute, system is unresponsive, can't switch to another virtual terminal). Oddly, if I change to a shell before running the partitioning tool and run "/usr/sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/hde5", it works fine.
Changing summary to reflect other problems also mentioned here (it seems there are more general problems installing on SATA drives).
After formatting my root file system (/dev/hde5) manually using mkfs.ext3, I go back to the installer and ensure it is not formatting /dev/hde5, proceed to package selection, where I add "Development Tools" to a "Personal Desktop" installation and continue the installation. I then get as far as "Transferring install image to hard drive...", where it hangs at 31%.
Can you also attach what parted sees the disk as looking like (run parted on the drive and then type print)?
Created attachment 94647 [details] output of parted /dev/hde print Also mentions geometry 9729/255/66 when parted is run interactively.
FWIW, the FreeBSD installer says the geometry was reported as 155061/16/63, but says that's probably wrong
parted (and thus the installer) is finding things correctly. Hangs are probably kernel land. But Test2 has a much newer libata codebase, and so should hopefully work much better. Leaving open until it can be verified against that.
fixed in current releases ?
I have since performed a few successful Fedora installations, but I now use a different partitioning scheme and do not rely on the Red Hat installer to create them. It's probably fixed, but I couldn't say so conclusively.