Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 5765
6.1 installer no longer groks extended partions, unlike 6.0
Last modified: 2015-01-07 18:38:39 EST
(Apologies for flagging "fdisk" as the component, I couldn't see an entry for the installer, which is what seems to be causing problems) The 6.1 installer, unlike its 6.0 predecessor, doesn't grok extended partitions. Thus, if you try to upgrade a RatHed system which is set up in this manner, it will insist that you "don't have any linux partitions" and refuse to play with you at all. Not happy! The only workaround I can see will take longer than installing from scratch, and reconfiguring- rebuilding my filesystems, and completely repartitioning all the drives.
Hi, I've had this problem as well. The error message I got on two very diverse i386 systems was "You don't have any Linux partitions." The upgrade refused to run. This happened after clicking on the "Upgrade" radio button then next in the installer. This is a critical problem, but is easily solved by a competent sysadmin. These two systems had exactly one thing in common -- a Win95 Extended Partition (LBA), partition type "f" instead of "5" for the extended partition. I ran fdisk to change the extended partition to type "5" on both systems and this solved it, and the upgrades went flawlessly. Clemmitt Sigler csigler@vt.edu ------- Additional Comments From 10/14/99 05:14 ------- Indeed, however, when you have a FAT32 partn in the extended partition too, things are a little more tricky. I found that the simplest way was to use fdisk (linux, not DOS) to make some more ext2 partitions, and xfer everything to those, and generally rebuild stuff.. :) The only gotcha was that I forgot to check what the default partition type was- it was ext2fs as created by fdisk.. This is sensible, of course. However, like an idiot, I merrily went and mkswapped, and started swapping onto the new partition, without going back to fdisk and checking the partition table. Linux will cheerfully swap to the drive with the type set to ext2fs, though. HOWEVER, the 6.1 installer tries really hard to mount that partition as e2 and just grinds to a halt, apparently with no timeout or bailout. That one took a couple of mins to fix, once I got my brain in focus. My bad, but the law of averages suggests that it might happen to other folks, too. Anyway, I have it all working now, but I thought it'd be an idea to submit these probs, since the sort of people who will have the most difficulty aren't experienced linux users or admins, natch. Maybe just an advisory in the errata section would be sufficient, since it is possible to work around the problem, just annoying at first.
This issue is resolved in the latest installer (Red Hat Linux 6.2)