From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010628 Description of problem: I have a dual boot system with two physical EDA drives The first drive is for exclusive use of MS Windows (2 partitions: /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2) The second drive (/dev/hdb) is for on half Win95 FAT32 (/dev/hdb1) and for the other half for Linux. I used to have RedHat 7.0 installed, with /dev/hdb2 as / and /dev/hdb3 for LinuxSwap Installing RH7.1 I choose the 'Automatic partition' option. Installation went OK, only I noticed that RH7.1 was being installed on /dev/hdb5. Back in MS Windows I noticed extremely slow operation, and a 'ghost' drive: 'E:', and a 'new' drive: 'F:' The contents of 'F:' is what used to be 'E:' Trying to access 'E:' resulted in heavy disk-noise, and finally an error that the disk media was not available. Back in Linux I checked fdisk, and found the following partition table: for /dev/hdb: partition: start stop 1kb blocks type ---------- ----- ---- ---------- ------------------ 1 1 389 3124611 b Win95 FAT32 2 390 396 56227+ 83 Linux 3 397 784 3116610 5 Extended 5 397 736 2731018 83 Linux 6 737 761 200781+ 82 Linux Swap So the RH7.1 installer added a small partition at the beginning of my original Linux partition (in Linux this is the /boot disk) AND it added an 'Extended' partition in which my remaining Linux partition was put, as well as the swap partition. Why did this happen, since you can have 4 primary partitions per disk, the 'Extended' partitionn is not required. And what happened to /dev/hdb4?? And why, but you may not be the right person to answer this question, is windows finding the ghost 'E:' disk. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RedHat 7.1 (not the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1) 2. 3. Additional info: I've installed Linux 7.1 on 2 other machines, and both have such a ghost disk, but the other two are not suffering from the (additional) slowness of MS windows. The other two machines were partitioned with manual partition (fdisk). I haven't checked the disk partitions from the other machines.
Virtually all the partitioning code has been replaced for the next version of Red Hat Linux, so I'm inclined to believe that this problem has already been fixed. In particular, the installer will only make an extended partition if there is only one primary partition left. That is, the installer will try to create primary partitions whenever possible and will use an extended partition only when necessary. Since it looks like your extended partition is hda3, that would explain why there is no hda4. Once you have an extended partition, the numbering for the logical partitions inside the extended partition starts at 5. For example, if you created one primary partition, one extended partition, and three logical partitions, it would look like this: hda1 - the one primary partition hda2 - the extended partition hda5, hda6, hda7 - the three logical partitions As for why Windows sees an E: drive, I can't say for sure. I think it may have to do with the fact that you still have unpartitioned space inside your extended partition. From your post above: 3 397 784 3116610 5 Extended 5 397 736 2731018 83 Linux 6 737 761 200781+ 82 Linux Swap you can tell that the Extended partition goes all the way out to cylinder 784, but your swap partition stops at cylinder 761. So, you have unpartitioned space between cylinders 762 and 784. Even if that is the problem, that doesn't explain why Windows performance would have degraded. At any rate, I think these problems will not happen in the next release. If you are interested, you could check out the latest public beta (Roswell) for the next version of Red Hat Linux to make sure that the problem does not still exist. It can be found at: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/roswell/en/iso/i386/ Please reopen this bug if you see this issue in the future.
Created attachment 30176 [details] A solution to the performance/ghost-disk problem