Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 84319
Corrupt Windows98 partition prevents install or upgrade
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
Description of problem: Hardware: Dell Dimension 4100 with a second 20GB IBM harddrive. I had a corrupt partition Windows98 Fat32X. This partition (before it became corrupted) had been mounted by my RedHat 7.2 installation. Anaconda would neither allow me to upgrade nor do a fresh install of RedHat 8.0 to my linux partitions because of this corrupt partition. [The first hardrive has Windows98 on it, the second harddrive had various partitions Linux partitions on it with a large (~6GB or ~8GB, i forget) windows partition at the end. The windows partition on the second drive became corrupted and i hope to at some point figure out what was wrong with it and possibly recover the data. Eventually i gave up and wiped the corrupt windows partition.]
What sort of error did you get if you attempted to install or upgrade?
It was a few weeks ago and it is difficult to remember. I think it was something relatively simple like 'unable to mount partition' and then start again, or words to that effect. Sorry i cannot be more specific. If perhaps there is a copy of the anaconda source in LXR or something i can browse online i would be willing to look through and see if i can recognise the error that occured. Thanks for your time, it is a pretty obscure problem I almost did not think it was worth reporting.
On an upgrade, if you have a filesystem listed in your fstab that can't be mounted, then yes, you would get that error and it's not something that's really fixable (how do you define a "necessary" partition, especially when people start symlinking things when they run out of space). I'd expect a fresh install where you weren't trying to mount the partition to work, though.