Over the last week or so I've had good luck with pxeboot rawhide installs using custom disk layouts. But yesterday I changed my office machine to an MSI P43 NEO3 and Anaconda was stumped.
Different versions of fdisk showed slightly different partitions. After several attempts to install Rawhide, I gave up and installed OpenSUSE, which installed without complaint. But Rawhide still couldn't hack custom layout.
I tried reverting to the "last known good" Rawhide from last year (anaconds 11.5.0.17) but custom layout still got an unhandled exception.
Finally I swapped hard drives and used Win XP to clear partitions and install Windows on a 50G partition. The current Rawhide was able to install using the "replace linux" option.
I know the details here are rather sketchy. I suspect the problem may be related to the motherboard and the apparent presence of two partition tables on the same drive. And the problem <so far> is appearing only on this motherboard.
Check Fedora Bug #489148 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=489148
Particularly the 'issues' part at the end of Comment #7
It seems like Anaconda does not use the partition information 'on disk' when trying to do an update. It is much more comfortable wiping the user's disk and doing a virgin install..
Bug above is directed to systems with motherboard raid hardware, but your note seems to indicate the problem might not be restricted to RAID.
Bob G
On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 10:43 -0700, Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R wrote:
Over the last week or so I've had good luck with pxeboot rawhide installs using custom disk layouts. But yesterday I changed my office machine to an MSI P43 NEO3 and Anaconda was stumped.
Different versions of fdisk showed slightly different partitions. After several attempts to install Rawhide, I gave up and installed OpenSUSE, which installed without complaint. But Rawhide still couldn't hack custom layout.
I tried reverting to the "last known good" Rawhide from last year (anaconds 11.5.0.17) but custom layout still got an unhandled exception.
Finally I swapped hard drives and used Win XP to clear partitions and install Windows on a 50G partition. The current Rawhide was able to install using the "replace linux" option.
I know the details here are rather sketchy. I suspect the problem may be related to the motherboard and the apparent presence of two partition tables on the same drive. And the problem <so far> is appearing only on this motherboard.
-- Chuck Forsberg caf@omen.com www.omen.com 503-614-0430 Developer of Industrial ZMODEM(Tm) for Embedded Applications Omen Technology Inc "The High Reliability Software" 10255 NW Old Cornelius Pass Portland OR 97231 FAX 629-0665