[101774] in RedHat Linux List
Problems with fdisk, redhat installation, etc
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (mott query)
Sun Nov 29 10:53:56 1998
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 10:53:24 -0500
To: redhat-list@redhat.com
From: mott query <mquery@crosslink.net>
In-Reply-To: <19981129070351.10737.qmail@lists.redhat.com>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
I made the unfortunate error of attempting to install RH 5.1 this weekend
and now am struggling to try to save my existing partitions. There are all
the usual warnings about backup, and as soon as I can figure out a way to
backup an 8 gig drive reasonably, I will take them all to heart....
Anyway, when trying the RH 5.1 installation (from a cd enclosed with _Linux
Unleashed_) I could not get the installation program to allow any disk
partitioning as I kept getting some odd error about no free space or
something of the sort. The drive had about 3 gigs of free space on it.
The error occurred when I would use partition magic to set up as HPFS
partitions the linux partitions I wanted, with the idea of using disk druid
to change them from hpfs to linux fs. The 5.1 version would not run fdisk
when I selected that choice on the install screen, which in retrospect may
have been a wise thing on its part.
I finally reverted to a 5.0 install, which did allow me to use fdisk, and I
created the partitions I wanted, wrote the partition table, then backed out
of the 5.0 install to restart with 5.1. At that point, I looked at the
partitions with partition magic, which reported that "Logical drive chain
extends towards start of drive," an error it characterized as typically
produced by Linux fdisk. After worrying about this for a while, I decided
the thing to do was to delete the partitions and try again using partition
magic, since it seems to handle partitioning more competently than fdisk.
So I restarted the 5.0 install, ran fdisk, deleted the partitions, then
backed out.
Running partion magic's info program (which is the only one I can run as it
will not modify the partition table of a drive in which it sees errors
without a switch which I have forgotten), it still shows the same
partitions that I thought I had deleted. So I restarted RH 5.0 and fdisk,
which also still showed the partitions I had deleted. So I deleted them a
second time and wrote out the new partition table. Rechecking with
partition magic showed these partitions to still be present. So now I have
something that fdisk modified enough to mess up but does not seem willing
to undo.
I apologize for the long story, but I hope someone might be able to suggest
a way to get rid of the offending partions without destroying the remaining
partition information. (Correcting the problem by destroying all the
partition information is fairly easy I suspect.) Thanks for any help.
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