Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 53778
/boot/efi partition not formated by installer
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:13 EDT
* test tree re0917.2 * test case ia64 / English / NFS / Everything / GUI Install Description of Problem: I did an Everything install. I selected "automatically partition disks", selecting all the available disks. It presented a reasonable set of partitions. I added a partition on one disk (/iso): there was empty space and I wanted to use it for HDD tests. I discovered that on /tmp/install.log there was indications that /boot/efi hadn't been formated: Installing kernel-headers. Installing kernel-smp. /boot/efi/initrd-2.4.9-0.4smp.img already exists. Installing ipchains. Installing iptables. Installing kernel. /boot/efi/initrd-2.4.9-0.4.img already exists.
Yes, per recommendation from Dell, /boot/efi is not formatted by default on workstation or custom installs. OEMs are using that partition to store their system utilities so we really shouldn't format it unless formatting all partitions.
I have found the problem in several installs: when I select "create all the partitions automaticaly" and answering "yes" to "Do you really want to destroy all the partitions and data?". Maybe a checkbox for "Include /boot/efi in the format" , or issue a warning about the DELL concern before going further... or even listing /boot/efi as a "Separate disc" when asking "which disks do you want to use in the installation?". The thing is, when selecting *all* the disks with all the partitions for Linux and after confirming "yes, go ahead and wipe out everything" ... I would expect to have everything wiped out. This also causes several "Red Hat Linux" entries in the EFI bootlist. Then, which one is good? This looks bad, to me.