Another issue with install and GPT

Scott Robbins scottro at nyc.rr.com
Sat Sep 17 11:52:55 UTC 2011


I accidentally sent this through a different address, so I think it's
just going to come back to me.  If it turns out to be a double post,
please forgive me.



I'm not sure if this is a bug, or a one time fluke.  I don't have time
or hardware to do several test installs, but perhaps someone else has
experienced it.  

What happened:  I used unetbootin (yes, I know it's not supported, but I
believe dd-ing an image to USB is supported, and might have the same
result.)

I installed.  I was not notified of a problem with not having a small
BIOS partition and thought the machine might have EFI support.  

After installation, I was unable to boot.  (This was at work, while
doing several things, and didn't write down the error.)  Having seen
some bugs having to do with SELinux, also tried to boot with enforce=0
but no luck.

I then reinstalled, this time making a 1 or 2 MB BIOS partition,  It
installed with problem.

What I think might have happened:

When I got to partitioning, the USB stick was shown as /dev/sdb.  It had
the EFI partition on it, put there, I imagine, when Unetbootin installed
the netinstall.iso that I used.  Therefore, Anaconda saw that there was
a BIOS partition and didn't give a warning. 

If this is the case, IMHO, it should just be pointed out in the release
notes.  Ideally, Anaconda would figure it out and point it out, but I
imagine that would be a lot of work, and it's late, and certainly not,
again IMHO, a blocker.

I reiterate, I don't know if that is what happened, it's just what I
think happened, and perhaps there was some other thing that I missed
that caused the first install to not boot.  Perhaps someone could test
this--install, from a USB onto a drive with no BIOS boot partition (and
no builtin EFI support), see if such a partition is shown on the USB
stick and see if, after installation, it boots.   
-- 
Scott Robbins
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I'm not gonna bother.


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