Description of problem: I have a Compaq R3000z (Athlon64) which has had this problem occur although I believe it occurs on other platforms and may have been reported against grub rather than anaconda (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139140 ). I have lots of disk space on the R3000z and after strinking the ntfs partition for WinXP down to a reasonable level (8GB), I have installed FC3 on the system (in fact, both i386 and x86_64 versions). The disk layout is: /dev/hda1 -- WinXP (C-disk) /dev/hda2 -- Linux swap /dev/hda3 -- minimal FC3 install as "boot director" and grub installed into MBR /dev/hda4 -- extended partion for rest of disk. /dev/hda5 -- 15GB partition for FC3 i386 /dev/hda6 -- 15GB partition for FC3 x86_64 /dev/hda7 -- rest of disk for common /home After installing the "boot directory" and getting it to boot up, I added "chainloader +1" entried for hda5 and hda6 to /boot/grub/grub.conf I then did everything installs of FC3 i386 and x86_64 into their appropriate partitions. I do not recall if I had any problems with the full i386 FC3 system and I worked with it on the R3000z since I had to play around to get X and other stuff configured correctly so things work. Today, I started in on the x86_64 system ... oops, grub failed when it tried to boot up. OK, boot the install CDROM in rescue mode and run grub from the chrooted system: root (hd0,5) setup (hd0,5) quit Reboot but now it hags tring to do stage2. OK, reboot the rescue cdrom and run: grub-install '(hd0,5)' Then reboot and success! While I found out how to get the system up and running, this should not have occurred.
this is a serious issue and should be delt with. this happened on a p4 2.4 ghz non-ht system. I had no other partitions other than Linux mounted at / and linux swap. But mostly I am glad to see that its not just me with the error.
I've had the same problem on an AMD768 system (dual Athlon MP) on a clean install (deleted all existing partitions). I suspect that the partitioning scheme is triggering this bug. This is the one I used (from anaconda-ks.cfg): #clearpart --linux #part / --fstype "ext3" --size=15000 --asprimary #part /zap --fstype "ext3" --size=20480 --asprimary #part /tmp --fstype "ext3" --size=5000 #part /var --fstype "ext3" --size=5000 #part swap --size=2048 #part /lho --fstype "ext3" --size=1 --grow Gene's solution worked for me too.
Fixed with newer grub using O_DIRECT