Description of problem: When installing, installation fails after packages have been chosen by failing to ignore partitions at the very end of the SAT Drive. I have tryed installing on pure IDE (with SAT in system) and have also changed the dev count on the SAT drive from 20 (Kernel Max) to 19 and the error still occurs. I am unable to install Fedora. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Core 1. How reproducible: Fails every time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Define a SAT drive with 19-20 partitions. 2. Install WINXP on Primary SAT, Linux Distros on other partions and define Linux (EXT3) partions to be used for /home /usr/local etcetera. 3. Try installing Fedora (Booting from CD) Actual results: Install fails with a reboot. Expected results: Installation of selected packages. Additional info: My installation is a P4 2.4Ghz, 1GB Ram, 120GB SAT, 60GB IDE with a Radeon 9200 card w/128mb
Created attachment 95793 [details] Error text that was generated by anaconda at installation failure
Looking at Bugzilla (I didn't see it when I posted) it appears that this is related to bug 56244 (Fdisk can't see more than 16 partitions). Since my SAT drive is accessed with SCSI (i.e. it's mounted as sdh). My other Linux distro's (Debian) mount it as hdg ??? but it permits 20 which I saw as the ide device maximum. I will try later on today or this weekend to reduce my 120GB to 16 partitions. I am still leaving this open as I would like to install with my SAT kept at 20 partitions. Thanks. Michael
This is a kernel limitation, not the installer.
Jeremy, Thanks for the info. I realize it's a kernel limitation and incidentally for me who's a multi-linux user it's a shock not only that the SAT drive is treated as a true SCSI thus it's 16 device limitation but that the number of entries in /dev/ for the sat drive seems to be limited to 16 in Redhat, 20 in Debian and if I use the 64 limit (stated elsewhere) in Redhat for IDE devices I will have incompatibilities in other distros... But this is rambling. I really do not know if the Fedora installer needs to know all the partitons on a drive but it shouldn't fail if that happens. I don't think that it was the grub code but the install that did fail on a drive which wasn't the installation drive when it simply should have continued.
I have limited my SAT 120GB drive to 16 Partitions and Ananconda still fails when trying to install packages. Other information - My primary partion on the SAT 120GB is NTFS. I tried to install to a normal IDE disk but install fails with error message on 16th partition. Please let me know if you want additional info.
This is indeed a SCSI limitation, and not something that can be changed easily. It will be resolved in late 2.6.x or early 2.7 when SATA moves away from SCSI.