About that installer...

[Tony Camuso]

On 03/12/2013 06:59 PM, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. wrote:
> On 03/12/2013 06:53 PM, Dan Irwin wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:42 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>> I think you should say *exactly* what you did with fdisk, each step.
>>> Because it still sounds like what you think is "creating free space,"
>>> probably isn't the same as what we might have done.
>> What i did exactly with fdisk was this:
>>
>> Switch to a vc
>> Delete /dev/sda3
>> Switch back to installer
>> No difference in behaviour, reboot
>> confirm no /dev/sda3 exists (fedora installer did not show /dev/sda3)
>> would not auto partition the drive
>>
>> Afterwards, the following partitions existed:
>> /dev/sda1 (Dell system) 30 MB or so
>> /dev/sda2 (Dell recovery) 15 GB or so
>>
>>

I suspect your Dell partitions are the reason for your problem. You may
have to delete them. You can clone them to a backup image if you really
want to preserve them somewhere, but I think you will need to
reinitialize your disk and start with a clean slate.

A few years ago, I had a problem with, a laptop that had a "media" mode
power-on button. Pressing this button powered-on the system but bypassed
booting the OS. Instead, it booted a media player app that allowed the
user to play DVDs on the optical drive without the hassle of waiting for
a full OS boot and logging in.

When installing a larger disk in this laptop, I simply cloned the old
disk, and then attempted to expand the OS partition into a greater
size. However, the partition utility could never see more than the
original size of the original (smaller) disk.

IIRC, the reason for this was that the boot record for the system used
a second LBA in which the partition for the "media" mode was set for
the last few LBAs in the disk, and no other part of the disk beyond
that was visible. There was code in the second LBA that was able to
determine if the "media" button had been pressed and therefore which
partition to boot.

I zeroed the second LBA in the disk and installed a new MBR, and I was
then able to see the whole new, larger disk. Of course, I lost the
"media" mode functionality, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff.

Regards,
Tony