Unable to align partition

Gene C. czar at czarc.net
Sun Mar 28 13:48:27 UTC 2004


On Sunday 28 March 2004 07:48, gplou at centrenad.com wrote:
> When installing core 2 test 1 the installer tell me about a problem with
> my partion "Unable to align..." If I ignore it, disk druid show my windows
> xp disk with some weird cylinder number and partition. Thats fine with me
> because I want to install to an other disk anyway. When I do that Fedora
> installation go fine but the installer write that broken partition over
> the old working one and I endup with my system not booting anymore. I
> think the installer shouldnt rewrite partition if you are not modifing
> them.
>
> I tought the problem was due to the partition I made from windows XP or
> something but every other distro I try install fine with no such problem.
> I got 2 computer with basicly the same setup and both get the error with
> fedora. Last nigh I gave an other try to it with the development boot.iso
> and a ftp install to the development tree and the same problem occur
> again.
>
> I did some googleing and search on the list but I couldnt find anyone else
> with the same problem and playing with my bios setting didnt help. Any
> idea? thx.

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=113201

Supposedly (comments either in bugzilla or one of these mailing lists) the 
problem is that the 2.6 kernel has changed a few things and also parted has 
been changed to not "fixup" things.  The result is that (IMHO) things are 
broken.  OK, what can be done ...

1. Only use fdisk to do allocations ... with druid, only edit existing 
partitions.

2.  Never modify a screwed up partition or do an install if the screwed up 
partition is hda or has a swap area. (I have been OK installing to a 
partition on hda and with the screwed up partition on a SATA drive which was 
hde on FC2).

3.  The most likely case (at least for me) is an LBA32 partition which comes 
up with native parameters.  This can be "fixed".  Knowing the LBA32 
parameters, you can override at boot time (including the install boot) by 
specifying hdx=cyl,heads,sectors.  For example, for a 120GB drive with native 
parameters of 238216,16,63 but LBA32 parameters of 14946,255,63 you would 
specify something like hda=14946,255,63 at boot time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I have seen the broken partition problem occur in two situations:

1. A 60GB Maxtor on hda was intially partitioned by win2k to install it.  
After that it was partitioned by FC1 (both parted initially and then fdisk) 
with no problems.  However, when I tried installed FC2 in a predefined 
partition, it came up "broken"  Interesting is that there is an identical 
60GB Maxtor drive as hdb and it has a good LBA32 partition.  To install 
FC2Test1, I used the LBA32 override described above.

2.  The second situation occurred when I installed a 120GB SATA drive on a 
system running FC1.  Under the 2.4 kernel and FC1, this drive is seen as a 
scsi drive and had parameters of 238216,16,63.  When I went to install 
FC2Test1, it reported that the partition table was screwed up.  Since I was 
not touching that disk, I ignored this and everything seems to be OK.  On FC2 
with the 2.6 kernel, the SATA drive is seen as a ide drive (hde in my case).

Hope this helps.

-- 
Gene





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