Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3518
Installer mkswaps all partitions the same size
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
I have an existing system that I did a clean install on (I didn't repartition the drives, but I did mke2fs them). I have a swap partition on both drives. The swap partition on the first drive is 50M and the one on the seconds drive is 90M. It looks like the installer ran "mkswap" with the same size on both swap partitions, because after installation and reboot, I have 100M of swap (looking at /proc/swaps there are two entries of 50M). I don't know what would happen if I tried to install and the first swap partition was bigger than the second; it looks like it could overwrite stuff past the second partition.
I have verfiied this to be a problem with a standard 6.0 install.
*** Bug 3761 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** I was doing a fresh install on a machine with a bit exotic setup: /dev/hda1 1 32 257008+ 6 FAT16 /dev/hda2 * 33 163 1052257+ 83 Linux /dev/hda3 164 527 2923830 5 Extended /dev/hda5 164 172 72261 82 Linux swap /dev/hda6 173 368 1574338+ 83 Linux /dev/hda7 369 527 1277136 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hdc3 1 508 512032+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hdc4 509 827 321552 5 Extended /dev/hdc5 509 574 66496+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hdc6 575 827 254992+ 83 Linux The hda6 is an old copy of Linux. I was installing RH 6.0 on /dev/hda2 with swap space on /dev/hda5 and /dev/hdc5. The setup has detected both swap partitions and I let it to reinitialise them. Being curious as always I watched the log messages on the other virtual screen. To my horror I noticed that the size of the both swaps was exact the same, corresponding to the /dev/hda5 :-( I verified the situation and corrected it manually, but if unnoticed, this could lead to severe problems. ------- Additional Comments From jturner@redhat.com 06/28/99 09:22 ------- Verified in test lab. Created 72M and 56M swap partitions, and the log messages showed that the installer was creating two 72M partitions. Completed installation and rebooted to find the following: "free" shows 144+M of swap space available to the system; fdisk shows a 72M and a 56M swap partition with 8 sectors and 6 sectors in use. Pretty strange!
This issus is resolved in the next cut of the installer.