Description of problem: Maybe it's wrong to call this a bug, but it may cause data loss if someone doesn't know what he's doing. When using a lvm setup with multiple drives that are only being used with lvm, you don't need to set up partitions on that drives. This works fine with lvm, but when anaconda starts diskdruid while installing/upgrading a fedora core installation, diskdruid offers to write a partition table to that disks. I did not test what happens to that disks if someone actually writes a partition table to a lvm used disk, but it may cause data corruption or even loss of data. Best regards Ariano How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. set up lvm without using partition tables on a harddrive. 2. install/upgrade fc on a system that contains one or more lvm used harddrives. Actual Results: The installer offered to initialize the lvm hds ad write a partition table on it without recognizing the lvm data on the harddrives. Expected Results: Anaconda/Diskdruid should probably check for lvm signatures on drives that seem to have no partition table and skip the partition table init on such drives. As there's a warning when "initializing" a disk without a partition table on it, most people should be warned anyway. I also assume that lvm users know about their hd setup, so it may be not a big problem at all.
We don't really support LVM on the bare disk without a partition table for reasons like this. Adding to a list to look into for FC4
*** Bug 154564 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
FC4 still has this behavior. Furthermore, as my /home is really on 2 LVM-only (no partition table) drives, anaconda refuses upgrade from FC3 to FC4, as it says it can't mount /home. My only choice was "OK" to reboot at that point, I couldn't get to a shell to fix it manually. It did find and start my / file system which is on a partition+LVM (default FC3 install).
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
Created attachment 134665 [details] Gzipped anaconda dump file (anacdump.txt.gz) Ok, I don't understand Jeremy's comment #1, since making a drive a physical LVM volume is perfectly legitimate and works great until you try to load or upgrade FC (and maybe RHEL, too: didn't try that). Using the FC5 DVD, I can neither upgrade nor install without destroying the PV on /dev/hdg (on an IDE expansion card). The upgrade or install fails even if I don't want to do anything at all to that drive. (That is, I can't upgrade the root partition on /dev/hda.) After clicking "Upgrading an existing installation" or "Install Fedora Core", I get "Warning: The partition table of device hdg was unreadable. To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this drive....Would you like to initialize this drive, erasing ALL DATA?" If I say No, anaconda crashes. (I'm not going to say Yes, I can't afford to wipe that disk.) "An unhandled exceptions has occurred. This is most likely a bug..." (No kidding!) The attachment is what I get on a floppy when I dump the anaconda state. I worked around this by unplugging the drive cable and upgrading root on /dev/hda. If I'd needed to upgrade on /dev/hdg I'd have been completely out of luck.
This is still a problem in F7. Anaconda doesn't crash when you choose to not wipe out your physical volumes but you can't continue with the installation if you say "No". I have my /home spread across 3 drives. Two of which have no partitions. I was assuming that I'd be able to leave /home alone and install just the OS from scratch. My gut tells me that the drives won't be touched unless I try to lay partitions on them but the volume that they belong to is 1.1T and I only have space to backup the critical files so I'm not going to risk it right now. I have another 400G drive coming in about a week. I may backup the rest of /home to the new drive and try again later. It would be nice if the installer would recognize these drives correctly or, if the installer isn't really going to wipe them out, maybe that warning message could be changed to explain what it's really going to do?
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