Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11215
Installer locks for dodgy partition table
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
When installing RH6.2 in graphical mode the installer hangs if you have a slightly dodgy partition table. If the Partitions on the disk are not in the correct order, eg a partition placed at cylinder 262-262 is listed after a partition placed at 263-264 the installer hangs due to the parition table being in the incorrect logical order. Fixed by resorting the partion table into the correct order, Bit of an issue for WIn32 users doing dual boot after using something like Partition Magic. The hang occurs as you press next in the 'select installation type' step.
Is this a matter of the partitions not being in the "correct" order, or rather that there is a logical partition missing? We have reports of people having similar problems where Partition Magic has created a null partition (generally hda5) thus the partition table looks like [hda1,hda2,(hda6)] when it should look more like [hda1,hda2,(hda5)] I will attempt to recreate this problem here in the lab.
In testing here at the lab I found that I was not able to replicate the problem you are seeing just by messing with the partition table. I tried misordering primary as well as logical partitions and the installer handled it without any problems. As soon as I used Partition Magic to remove the hda5 logical partition (and thus leaving a null partition) the installer would signal 11 on install and upgrade, so I am betting this is what you are seeing. I am trying to get in touch with the Partition Magic folks and see what the workaround should be for this situation.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 10518 ***