FC4 Test 1 Install Report (Failed! BOO! :)

[Dana Lacoste]

So after a couple of years of using FC1 I thought I'd take
my handy new laptop (thank you work!) and put FC4 on it.

Here's a long-ish story of my install adventure.  If you don't
want to read the story, my fatal error is at the bottom, and
I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to prevent or fix it!

I don't know if I should enter it in bugzilla though: does
anyone know what the specific issue is?  I tried searching
through buzilla but I couldn't find this issue....

Anyways, on with the story :

Hardware is an IBM Thinkpad R50p.  P4-M, ATI FireGL.
60G hard drive and 2G RAM.  Shouldn't be any problems,
now should there?

Downloaded 4 CD ISOs, installed without any problems, picked
my list of applications and installed away.  I had a system
with my work-provided Windows XP partition that I had resized
with a rescue CD and qtparted and was planning on using half
the drive for FC4, half for XP.

System installed fine, no problems, rebooted, FC4 loaded,
everything seemed to work fine, with only two "warnings" :

- One of the system startup scripts failed.  I couldn't tell
which one though because it gave pages of errors.  I'll figure
it out some day: it didn't seem important to me :)

- It went from disk 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, then BACK to disk 2.
Why?  Why couldn't it install the disk 2 packages (TeX stuff)
the first time it was on disk 2?

I could live with those though: EVERYTHING else worked perfectly,
no problems, no issues.  Graphics and sound and everything.

I was very happy.

So I decided to reboot into windows to see if I had been booked
into any meetings in outlook (I know, use evolution, but I had
spent a couple of hours by this point, so I thought I should check
out windows.

Windows started to load (off my grub option) then almost immediately
failed and BSOD'd with an error "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297185
documents this error.

Rebooting and trying "safe mode with console" showed that it wasn't
able to access files off the disk, somehow, while booting (????)

I said "OK" and did some more investigating.

I tried the following :

- Rerun qtparted to delete linux partitions
- Rerun linux install without grub
- Run Windows XP "Repair Console"

It was this last that showed a hint: it saw the disk "C:" as a single
partition of 60GB.  Not a 30GB partition for Windows XP.

So I thought "hey, grub is putting the partition table in a weird state."

I reinstalled XP (problem went away) and reinstalled without grub.

Same error, repeated.

So I did some more investigating and this is my conclusion :

PROBLEM:
FC4 Disk Druid re-writes the partition table in a format (somehow) that
Windows XP can't understand.

SOLUTION:
Don't use disk druid?  (BUT if I don't do this, then how the hell do
I install?  The automated partition tool won't "automagically" use the
existing partitions I created using qtparted.

SEVERITY:
STUPIDLY high.  Completely trashes any XP installation (well, makes
the partition table inaccessible to XP, effectively the same thing.)

REPRODUCABILITY:
Well, I'd really really like NOT to reproduce it, but I can tell in
short order if it's messed up.  If you know of a tool that will
"restore" my partition table to the previous configuration, I'm
willing to see if that will let me "fix" the problem if it messes
up and  run a few tests....

I'm open to suggestion and knowledgable enough to try pretty much
anything if you're curious.  I just don't happen to have a MBR/
partition table hex editor around (any suggestions?  Besides "dd"? :)

Thanks for any help or suggestions!

Dana Lacoste