Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 18231
Autopartitioning fails with "no free slots" on Mylex Acceleraid (DAC960)
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:28:56 EDT
I consider this to be a bug, because installation fails. However, if this fails by design, consider it a RFE. I was trying to install Red Hat 7.0 on a server with Mylex AcceleRAID 250 (DAC960PTL1) but ran into some problems. The kernel from 6.2 had a patch for the DAC960 driver that allowed it to use 16 partitions on one logical device. A good thing. The kernel driver in 7.0 does not appear to have this patch, so that when you create partitions for /boot, <swap>, /, /var, /tmp and /home - partitioning fails! This is bad. The only messages given as reasons are "autopartitioning failed" (even if you made them using text-mode fdisk) and "failed to allocate /: no free slots" These messages are only visible on the console on alt-f3, the message in disk druid is even more terse. Please consider applying the same kernel patch as in 6.2 or at least change the error message in the installer to indicate that this is a limitation in the RAID controller driver. It wasn't clear to me what "slots" the messages was referring to and why the autopartitioning failed.
I am looking into the history of the DAC960 support - it appears we currently restrict you to 7 partitions per device. I hope to have more information soon.
It also appears that Disk Druid defaults to create one primary and all the other partitions as extended: 1. Entering Disk Druid, if I "Add" /boot, it gets device rd/c0d0p1. 2. Then I add / and it gets device rd/c0d0p5 3. Add swap, it gets c0d0p6 4. Add /home it gets c0d0p7 5. Add /var -- and I get an error message saying "No free slots" This means that in practice using Disk Druid partitiong, DAC960 is restricted to 4 partitions. If the logical raid device has more than 4 partitions created with fdisk prior to booting the 7.0 installer, the installer does not even start disk druid, it only says "no free slots" and only gives two choices: retry or reboot.
Ok you are correct, the installer currently limits the maximum partition number to 7, not the *number* of partitions. I am still trying to find out why this limitation exists.
Matt do you remember why you added code with this restriction?
Thats a Mylex BIOS limitation. See http://www.dandelion.com/Linux/README.DAC960
Thanks for the information. Closing as notabug.
Please! That was a bit too quick. Please read my comments above: "This means that in practice using Disk Druid partitiong, DAC960 is restricted to 4 partitions. " The README.DAC960 states that the Mylex is limited to 7 partitions by default. But the Red Hat 7 installer further limits the number to 4. Not seven. FOUR. Please consider this bug to be a RFE for the installer to fully support the 7 partitions on the Mylex and not just 4 of them.
*** Bug 22429 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***