Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 23423
Factory installation fails on IDE drives.
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:30:33 EDT
Factory installation fails on IDE drives. Fdisk shows that an IDE drive that that had this geometry on RH Linux 7.0 /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2432 cylinders has this geometry on Florence beta1 /dev/hda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 38760 cylinders We have a 3 GB Win95 partition that we use for our factory installation. With a geometry of 16 heads the Win95 partions ends on cylinder 6248. This is beyond the 1023 limit and kickstart blows up. fdisk also has the following error: partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundry: phys = (391,254,63) should be (391,15,63) which indicates that the system is confused about the disk geometry. This is a show stopper for factory installation for systems with IDE drives.
The kernel is reporting a different geometry in 2.4 than 2.2. Assigning to kernel component.
Florence Beta 2 Test system: Precision 330 w/ Pentium 4 step 7, 768 RAM, 40 GB IDE Drive Drive geometry as reported on HDD label: 16386 C/16 H/ 63 S. Test procedure: Make a Win95 2.5 GB partition with Win95 fdisk. Make the partition active and format it. This works: Boot from RH 7 CDROM Type: linux rescue Type: mknod /dev/hda Type: fdisk /dev/hda Type: p Fdisk reports: Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4982 cyclinders /dev/hda1 * 1 319 256233 b Win85 FAT32 This doesn't work: Boot from Florence Beta2 CDROM Type: linux rescue Type: mknod /dev/hda Type: fdisk /dev/hda Type: p Fdisk reports: Disk /dev/hda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 79406 cyclinders (note that this is the incorrect number of heads and cylinders) /dev/hda1 * 1 5085 256233 b Win85 FAT32 (wrong number of cylinders) Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundry phys (318,254,63) should be(318,15,63) There are several problems with this: The cylinder count is very wrong - it is more than physically possible. The preferred geometry is 255,63,4982 as reported by RH 7. The result is that we can't install Florence Beta2 if there is an existing WIN95 pertition.
This defect is considered MUST-FIX for Florence Gold release
This is almost certainly due to our attempt to support modular IDE. Modular IDE has, among other things, problems dealing with geometry. We have reverted to static IDE for the future. If the next beta doesn't fix this, please re-open this bug report.
Confirmed fixed in beta3/fisher