FC2 ate my system+ RANT

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Thu, 27 May 2004 13:13:31 -0500
akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:

> I went to the web site and the description of this problem is
> unbelievable. I can't see how if someone knew about it it was not
> fixed. When FC2 is installed it changes the geometry recorded for your
> disk. For example, if you started with 255 heads configured it is
> changed to 16. The fix is easy unless you don't know that is 
> happening because then you would go crazy trying to find out.
> Now even the fix which they say is easy depends on your knowing how
> many heads you originally had. Do you know that for all your disks? I
> don't. If you don't know that there is no way to recover from this
> bug. So to say the recovery is easy as the RedHat message does is
> certainly very deceptive. 
> Well there is my rant for the day.


Hi Aaron,

That description is rather thorough and perhaps makes the solution seem
more complicated than it really is.    It's really as simple as setting LBA mode
for your disk in the BIOS.

Absolute worse case if your BIOS doesn't support that you have to run
a command after the install, something like:

# sfdisk -d | sfdisk -H255 -f  /dev/hda

The number of people who reported this problem via bugzilla during 
the testing phase wasn't sufficient to duplicate or understand the problem
or make it clear that it affected more than a handful of people.   


Cheers,
Sean