Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 31854
Installer reboots if a logical partition with zero start, end, and partition type is encountered.
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:32:11 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win98; U) I had a disk partitioned in Win9x. I cleared off one of the partitions, but didn't delete the partition. When I went to install RH7, I chose the fdisk partitioning, chose the proper drive to partition, and realized that I didn't know which Win9x partition to delete. I rebooted into Win98SE and deleted the partition. When I went back into the RH7 installation, I chose fdisk partitioning, and the computer rebooted itself. This was before it gave me a chance to select the drive. This happened every time. Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1.Delete a Logical DOS drive in Win98SE fdisk. It may be significant that there were other logical partitions; I don't know. 2.Attempt to install Red Hat 7 3.Choose fdisk partitioning Actual Results: Immediate reboot without error messages. Expected Results: Menu asking which disk to partition. As a diagnostic, I rebooted from the RH7 CDROM. I started fdisk in the shell on console 2. Fdisk did not crash or fail in any way. When verifying the partition table, it gave the warning: Partition 5 is empty The partitions were listed as 1 (FAT32), 2 (Linux), 3 (Windows Extended (LBA)), 6 (Linux), 7(Linux Swap), 8(FAT32). In expert mode, partition 5 was listed, but was empty, with zero start, end, and partition type. The linux partitions were from a separate old linux installation that I wish to preserve; Partition 5 is where I wish to install RH7. After deleting partition 5 (and rebooting), the Red Hat installer allowed me to run fdisk again. I could create a new linux partition, fix the order (xpert menu 'f'), and install RH7 there. It appears that the Red Hat installer couldn't handle the empty partition created by deleting partition 5 in Win98.
Thank you for the report. I will keep this information around to help other users.
I've made a change to tell the user when this type of partition has been detected, and inform them we will not install to this type of drive. This is an issue I will try to address in a future release. At least it will not segfault now.