FC1 -> FC2 upgrade problem...

Mike Cisar mlists at starmania.net
Wed Jul 21 21:13:22 UTC 2004


> -----Original Message-----
> > Per your description above you are using the physical CHS 
> > configuration on the drives.
> > As has been noted many times on this list, anaconda as used 
> > in FC2 wants the LBA configuration for the drives.

Went a step further on this system, replaced both drives (individually),
redid the partition tables from scratch so that they matched what FC1 was
seeing for logical geometry (and verified that parted didn't throw up any
concerns about the partition tables.   At this point both drives are
detected in the CMOS as 29437/16/255...  in FC1 /proc/ide shows both hda and
hdc as 29437/16/255 physical and 7476/255/63 logical, the drives are
partitioned using the 7476/255/63 geometry... the kernel (in boot.log)
however sees hda as 29437/16/255 and hdc as 119150/16/63.  Everything works
fine and no complaints under FC1 from either fdisk or parted.

Then, tried again to run an FC2 upgrade... at boot of the installer the
kernel sees both of the drives as 65535/16/63 but in /proc/ide it sees
4047/16/255 as physical and 65535/16/63 for logical.  

Now admittedly my BIOS seems to have some issues as shown by the different
geometries seen by the kernel in FC1... *BUT* it seems to me after this
drive transplant that there is definitely some issue more than just the bios
with how the FC2 kernel detects the drive geometry.  It would seem a logical
assumption to me that it is detecting the 119150/16/63 but using a numeric
type that is too small thus truncating to 65535/16/63 and then somehow
calculating the logical geometry from that value (since they are both about
54 or 55% of their respective proper values).

Hard coding the hda and hdc parameters on the kernel command line (to the
logical 7476/255/63 values that match the partition tables) does not seem to
make the FC2 installer any happier, though I neglected to note what the proc
and kernel values were during that test.

Can anyone think of any other things I can try, prior to trying a
motherboard transplant and hoping it works better?

>>>>> Mike <<<<<





More information about the fedora-list mailing list