From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (WinNT; U) I have Compaq Deskpro EN 866 with 20 GB IDE Hard Disk. I partitioned the Hard Disk in 50/50 ratio and installed Windows 2000 on first partition. During the Disk Setup window with Disk Druid in Red Hat 7.1 installation, if I add "/boot" partition, I get following error message: "There are currently unallocated partition(s) present in the list of requested partitions. The unallocated partition(s) are shown below, along with the reason they were not allocated. /boot Boot partition > 1024 cylinders" When I did the same process with Red Hat 7.0, I didn't get such error message at all. It only happens with Red Hat 7.1. What is causing this problem in Red Hat 7.1? Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Partition HD 50/50 Ratio 2.Install Windows 2000 in first partition 3.Try to Install Red Hat 7.1 in secon partition and you will see the error message. Actual Results: "There are currently unallocated partition(s) present in the list of requested partitions. The unallocated partition(s) are shown below, along with the reason they were not allocated. /boot Boot partition > 1024 cylinders" Expected Results: See above error message I can't create kickstart installer for Dual Boot System due to above error message. If we have to use fdisk then it's not very pratical since our company is planning to support thousands of Linux users in JPL and we need to install so many times in same configuration for dual boot system with Windows 2000. Please help me to solve this issue so your distribution can be the official distribution for our our company and JPL as well.
Are all the systems identical? What you can do is bascially script what you want fdisk to do in the '%pre' section of the kickstart file. It's not ideal, but I think it would be a suitable workaround. The syntax is pretty bad, but think of each line as a separate command into fdisk. You should play around with this on a test machine before you deploy it, though, to make sure your fdisk script is right. Otherwise you could lose data on the drive. In the %pre section, you can do something like this:%pre mknod /tmp/hda fdisk /tmp/hda << EOF n p 1 1 105 t 1 6 p w EOF
Yes, all the systems should be identical since our company (OAO) is going to offer only one single configuration to our customer (JPL) I'm in lead in this project and if I can't make the installer easy for our customer with Red Hat, then I have no choice to look for other alternative. I'll try your fdisk script in kickstart configuration file. I hope you can fix this problem (BUG) soon in your next version. Sincerely.
Well, if the systems have not already been deployed, then you could create a 35MB /boot partition under the 1024 cylinder limit. Or you could use the first half of the drive for Linux and the second half for Linux. It would be transparent to the user.
IT WORKS!!! I tried your suggestion #2 (Install Windows on 2nd partition then Install Linux on 1st partition). Here is the process: (Fortunately, we have a Ghost Image for Windows 2000 so I used Ghost Command Line Switch) 1) Create two partitions on Hard Drive in 50/50 ratio using Ghost 2) Install Windows 2000 Image on 2nd parition using Ghost 3) Install Red Hat 7.1 on 1st partition using Kickstart (Advanced Settings with pre-configured lilo.conf file) Thank you. It will save us a lot of time. Please close this ticket since I found a good solution (workaround) but I still think you should fix this problem(bug) in your future release.
Good. I'm glad you found a workaround. Here's the reason that it was changed: putting boot partitions above the 1024 cylinder limit works just fine on some motherboards, but not on others. We can query the BIOS to see if it supports it, but some motherboards appear to support it, but they really can't...so that leaves the user with an unbootable system after installation. It's unfortunate in your case that 7.1 no longer allows you to do this, because apparently your motherboard can handle it ok. In retrospect, maybe the correct thing to do would have been to pop up a dialog saying something like "Hey, your motherboard may not support doing this...do you want to continue anyway?" It was a tough call, but we chose the path that we thought was best. This is an issue that we take seriously and we will try to address this in a future release. Thanks for your report and good luck with your roll-out of the new systems.