From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: When allocating disk partitions on large logical disk volumes it is possible that disk druid will leave unreclaimable free space in the with certain input paramters. No linux utility including disk druid, sfdisk or fdisk can reclaim this space, and unless a third party's vendor product like Partition Magic is used, the only recourse to reclaim the space is to install RedHat from scratch. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Begin RedHat install on a large disk or large disk volume, 20 Gigs or greater. 2. When Disk Druid comes up select the disk or disk volume to begin the install. You may have to delete an existing partition if you have used a Windows utility to partition the disk or disk volume. 3. Allocate /boot filsys partition 50 - 200 Megs, and select primary option. 4. Allocate swap 512 Meg - 1 Gig, again with primary option. 5. Allocate root file system, 8 Gigs or greater. Select primary option. 6. Attempt to allocate any file system partition of any size for the remaining free space. Actual Results: Disk Druid will not let the user allocate any more partitions, even though there is at least 11 Gigs of free space on the disk volume. Expected Results: Disk Druid should impose rules about primary partition allocations or provide suggestions about reallocating the space to avoid unallocatable free space on the volume. The simplest, most user friendly, would be if disk druid upon seeing that the user entered 8 Gig partition for root fsys to automatically allocate all the remaining free space for the root file system, and display a prompt to the user to accept this partitioning scheme. Disk Druid should minimally display a warning message that if the user proceeds with the current allocation, that it would leave several Gigs of unreclaimable free space on the volume. Additional info:
You are correct a user could encounter a problem. However, some partitioning knowledge is assumed if you start picking 'Force to be primary'. Left alone Disk Druid will use an extended partition and should avoid the problem you are describing if I understand correctly. We will consider this request for a future release. It would be a nice touch.