Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 175345
anaconda fails to recognize partition table
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:18 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031030 Description of problem: OK, I raised this bug against FC4 but I cannot remember the bug number and I cannot find it in a simple search and I cannot even use my old bugzilla account because the "Forgot my Password" link on your bugzilla login page doesn't do anything. So I created a new bugzilla account and enjoyed reentering my login into five times as I navigated through the easy_enter_bug pages. Something is quite screwy in your bugzilla setup. Now, this bug. This machine has a workable partition table, but anaconda says "unable to read partition table of /dev/sda". I'd say that there's something slightly screwy about my partition table which confuses anaconda, but everything else is happy with it. I'll give you three attachments here - the anaconda log, the syslog and the first 128k of my /dev/sda. (getting rather tired of FC1) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Be me. 2. 3. Additional info:
Created attachment 122064 [details] anaconda.log
Created attachment 122065 [details] syslog
Created attachment 122066 [details] first 128k of /dev/sda
so it appears that anaconda is using parted? I did parted /dev/sda: bix:/home/akpm> 0 parted /dev/sda GNU Parted 1.6.3 Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. Using /dev/sda Warning: Unable to align partition properly. 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 boot loaders.
OK, so that disk had a funny partition table. With fdisk: Disk /dev/sda: 146.8 GB, 146815733760 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17849 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 65 522081 83 Linux /dev/sda2 66 17849 142849980 83 Linux /dev/sda3 * 1025 17849 135146812+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA) I deleted the win95 partition and parted (and hence anaconda) seems happy with it. Only to discover that the fc5-test1 installer appears to have no way to upgrade an existing install - it appears to insist on wiping all partitions and repartitioning. Don't want to do that. I guess you can kill this bug off.
Thanks for the report (and the diagnosis). Yeah FC5 test1 intentionally didn't support upgrades due to large amount of work being done on anaconda for FC5 (as mentioned in release email) - FC5 test2 will though.