Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 29205
Disk druid (both text and GUI) has error when creating partitions.
Last modified: 2007-03-26 23:41:38 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Disk druid gives error "/... Couldn't fit boot partition. System has a 45GB WD drive, 440BX motherboard, Celeron 400MHz processor. Linux shares disk with Windows 2000 and I use Windows' boot manager or floppy disk to launch Linux. This only occurs with Fisher, I had no problem with RedHat 7.0 or other distributions. I had to use RedHat 7.0 (or PartitionMagic) to create my Linux partitions and then install 'Fisher.' If I have don't create the partitions first or delete them with Disk Druid when installing 'Fisher', I can not add them back again. The install proceeded well after that but had another problem when kdm launched (See bug report against kdm.). I also noted that when 'Fisher' installed it took a lot longer than RedHat 7.0 to run ananconda (1 - 2 minutes longer). It spent a lot of time accessing the hard disk and CDROM (access lights flashed back and forth). If not for the disk lights I would have though it had died. This also happened at another point in the installation before ananconda. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Started installation of 'fisher' from CDROM 2. Tried to use Disk Druid to configure 45GB hard disk 3.
Please give the original partition state of your system and the partition state when you are trying to add the '/' partition. Most likely you are trying to add '/' and there is only space about the 1024 cylinder limit, so the allocation fails (since we can only be sure that BIOS will boot from below the 1024 cylinder limit).
We (Red Hat) should really try to resolve this before next release.
I am installing the boot partition about the 1024 cylinder limit. I tried the "Wolverine" beta version and it also returned an error, but gave a clearer message, saying the boot sector was greater than the 1024 limit. However, RedHat 7.0 allowed me to create a boot partition above this limit. I did have to change the lilo.conf file to use 'LBA32' to get lilo to work. 'Wolverine' gave a warning message after the disk druid saying that the BIOS appeared to support LBA. Shouldn't disk druid give a warning but still allow you to create the partition?
Because of the problems we've seen with different BIOSs returned erroneous information about whether or not they support LBA32, we opted to not let disk druid create partitions which extend above the 1024 cylinder limit automatically. If you make a partition with the fdisk program, then assign it to '/' (or '/boot') in the disk druid screen, it will let you use it. Be sure you make a boot floppy no matter what you do, in case something goes wrong with your motherboard/LILO interaction.