Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 137598
Kickstart complains about partitioning problems.
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:04 EST
Description of problem: My kickstart setup is currently working flawlessly, except that on some systems we get a warning message regarding partition tables being misaligned. These error messages persist across multiple Linux installs; the only program touching the partition tables is sfdisk. They don't appear to do anything Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHEL3 Desktop, though it has been observed on older systems. How reproducible: It only occurs on some systems, and with some hard drive setups. Our general setup is a 20GB system disk, and a 120GB scratch disk; the scratch disk is ignored by the kickstart setup. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start kickstart setup. 2. Wait until after it's found its DHCP address and starts to partition the system. 3. Error message pops up. Actual results: "Unable to align partition correctly. This probably means that another partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it didn't have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some bootloaders." Expected results: This error message shouldn't pop up. Additional info: It *may* be related to moving jumpers around on the systems; at least once we have been able to avoid the problem by reseating a jumper, anyway. This doesn't make logical sense to me. Anyway, I would like some way to ignore "warning" messages like this in kickstart.
Usually it is caused by the BIOS providing a view that's inconsistent with what the partition tables have on them. You can work around by using %part --initlabel in your ks.cfg although note that this will remove all data on the drives.