Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 34174
rc2 anaconda won't reset trashed MBR
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
Using 7.1-rc2, I overwrote /dev/hda w/ image of dhcp-kickstart-bootnet.img (to speed up loading of installer). cat dhcp.ks.bootnet.img > /dev/hda upon rebooting, using TUI ftp install, anaconda complained: fdisk error: cylinder boundaries don't match drive geometry (naturally, i just hosed my MBR...) my *only* option was to skip drive, resulting in a "no valid drives found" error and a tailspin... from the command line, fdisk knows how to reset the mbr. the installer should offer this option as well... as i understand it, currently, if your MBR is hosed, anaconda won't install. (assuming you don't know enough about fdisk to go to the command line). thanx! --bowe
We will consider different behavior in the future - admittedly your case is an extremely rare incidence (most users do not mess manually with the boot sector). You can just goto VC2 (cntl-alt-f2) when you get to this point in the install and mknod /tmp/hda fdisk /tmp/hda and reset it as you like.
agreed, but note that VC2 is not an option for kickstart installs (where 'wipembr yes' has been defined!) (although inelegant scripting of fdisk through %pre would be possible). FWIW, i'm not sure it's "extremely rare" for someone to be handling an unitialized drive at install time. I've been frustrated with other "unnamed vendors ;)" providing an installer that demanded that I had an initialized MBR before. For an installer not to be able to trivially configure blank media seems a bad assumption. thanx! --bowe
As msf said, this is something we will consider for the future. It's much too late in the cycle to consider this for the current release. Deferring.
Should work better with roswell.