Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 47963
swriteboot fails due to OSF-style overlapping partitions
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:34:34 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux sparc64; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010702 Description of problem: During the last stage of the Red Hat 7.0->7.1 upgrade install when the bootloader is written to disk, it fails with this syslog message: error: bootcode overlaps with partition #1. If you really want this, use -f1 My partition layout is as follows: 4 partitions: # start end size fstype [fsize bsize cpg] a: 1 1* 0* boot b: 1* 244* 242* swap c: 1 1940* 1939* unused 0 0 d: 244* 1940* 1696* ext2 Since partitions a (sda1) and c (sda3) overlap for OSF/Tru64 compatibility, the fix is to specify parameters to swriteboot to allow it to write to overlapped partitions: swriteboot -f1 -f3 /dev/sda1 bootlx I had to boot in rescue mode and execute this command manually in order to make the system bootable. How reproducible: Didn't try Actual Results: swriteboot failed during installer. System was unbootable after upgrade from RH 7.0 to RH 7.1 Expected Results: swriteboot should not ever fail to install the bootloader Additional info: Computer is a Digital Personal Workstation (Miata) 500au.
I just realized how confusing the BSD partitions are when viewed in cylinder units. Here it is again in sector units. I would highly recommend to anyone that they use sector units when dealing with BSD disklabels. 4 partitions: # start end size fstype [fsize bsize cpg] a: 0 2047 2048 boot b: 2048 1050623 1048576 swap c: 0 8380079 8380080 unused 0 0 d: 1050624 8380079 7329456 ext2
Phil, any ideas here?
Yikes, I don't think we support that configuration Passing over to Matt for comment
No, aboot would overwrite parts of your 1st partition. Why do you have a partition of type "boot"?
The first partition labelled 'boot' is just reserved space for aboot. It is meant to be overwritten with swriteboot. When I set this up originally, I had Tru64 on the box, and I was following this HOWTO for how to partition the disk for both Tru64 and Linux: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/SRM-HOWTO/x661.html#AEN708 It explains pretty clearly that 'a' and 'c' MUST start at 0 for Tru64, and suggests the use of 'a' to be used for aboot. Given that this HOWTO is out there, and Tru64 requires 'a' and 'c' to begin at offset 0, shouldn't the Red Hat installer support this? If not, the installer should at least check for an unsupported layout and warn the user. Maybe you could do both. When you are about to do the swriteboot, pop up a dialog box if there are overlapping partitions: "WARNING: Partitions sda1 and sda3 overlap. Writing the bootloader could overwrite the data on these partitions. This may be normal if you partitioned the disk under Compaq Tru64 UNIX, in which case it is safe to continue. Would you like continue writing the bootloader, or skip it entirely? (Continue) (Skip)"