Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 127604
Invalid partition table accepted by Disk Druid
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:45 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1 Description of problem: Logical /boot partition is not acceptable for GRUB. However, Disk Druid accepts such a set up when it is pre-partitioned, an the only thing done during installation is choosing which partition does what. I believe Disk Druid needs an enhancement (to fix what can be called a bug): if the user specifies GRUB as bootloader and /boot is not primary, this should be descriptively reported back to the user. The code to check this is already there, because this gets prevented while partitioning Linux setup entirely in Disk Druid, but if partitioning has been done in advance (such as w/ fdisk), Disk Druid lets it pass. The fix would probably be trivial, such as calling an existing method, getting a false return value, and not accepting user's selection of /boot partition when it's logical, and GRUB is the loader chosen. P.S. Pre-partitioning appears to be a relatively common thing to do. And yes, i will never forget the lesson learnt, but i wish i didn't spend that much time on learning it. :) Fixing this would save time to many other folks. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot from a rescue CD 2. Partition the disk to be used for Linux install, providing a /boot partition that is logical (i used fdisk) 3. Boot from Fedora install CD 4. Choose GRUB as loader, and the previously made logical partition as /boot 5. Finish installing (installing GRUB into /boot): message is given that install is successful. 6. Boot (if necessary first change a flag on the /boot partition in step 2) Actual Results: Invalid partition table (and failure to boot into Linux) Expected Results: Successful boot into GRUB OS selection, or straight into FC (2). Additional info: I encountered this in a dual-boot setup, and this is more likely to happen for dual-boot systems, but it is just as well applicable to single boot setups. At the very least, it would be useful to have it in a QA, because i'm sure not everybody knows that logical /boot and GRUB don't work together.
Unfortunately, some BIOSes will allow this and it's not possible to tell those that can vs those that can't.
Well, if some BIOSes can work with logical /boot partition and GRUB, and apparently many or most can't, then the least we can do is add this information to the Q&A. I think it would be a good policy overall. My goal is to save people time, because i am not a big fan of spending time on issues like this, and learning it all on my own. If such cases are listed in QA, a lot of efficiencies will be realized across the community.