Rawhide trashes 320g drive on format

[Will Woods]

On Apr 16, 2008, at 9:21 AM, cloneu2 wrote:
> I have tried over the last week or so to install f9 with a network  
> install.  Everything goes fine until it is time to format the drive.  
> It will start and then at about 15% complete the system just locks.   
> I have tried the text mode install and at that point the screen just  
> fills with junk.  It is a sata320.  The only way I can fix the drive  
> is to do a f9 beta install over the drive again.  I can't even use  
> gparted (on another f9 install) to reformat the drive with ext3  
> format.  It will format in fat32.
> will the preview release, if it ever comes out, fix this problem?

Hard to say without actually knowing what the problem is.

What hardware are you using? sata controller, drive model/size? how  
old is the drive?

The on-screen garbage is caused by the kernel spitting out a bunch of  
messages to the console, but they get mangled by the text-mode dialog  
stuff. My hunch is that they'd point to a faulty SATA controller or  
hard drive. But we need to see those messages to diagnose the problem.

Before the garbage appears on-screen, can you switch to terminal 5  
(alt-F5) and watch at the messages there? There's also shell on VT2  
(alt-F2) - if the system isn't locked up, you can check the logs in / 
tmp/syslog and /tmp/anaconda.log from there too. Since you're doing a  
network install you should be able to scp the logs off the system.

Please file a bug in Bugzilla - version rawhide, component kernel -  
with the info requested above, so we can keep track of this stuff.

-w