DIsk Druid Bugs in installation of latest Fedora

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 09:42:04AM -0400, pking123 at sympatico.ca wrote:
> I am going on my memory of this, so please pardon the vagueness.

Okay, but it'll have to make any answers pretty vague too.

> I have a few problems with the latest Fedora install system. The
> installation gave no other option for configuring hard disks other than to
> use Disk Druid. DIsk Druid could not handle one of my hard drives, and I
> believe it was the one located on my Promis Card. It complained that it
> could not read the partition table. I was not happy with this, since this
> HD contained the partitions for /home and /usr/local/. fdisk had no
> problem reading this disk when I went to a separate console. In fact,
> mount also worked.

So..... actually, the installer *does* give you the option of using fdisk,
via the alternate console....

> The deal with the install program is that it refused to go ahead unless
> there was a /home partition somewhere (there should be no reason for
> this). With nothing entered for /home, it first installed in the /
> partition, and /usr/local/ could also be dealt with. The problem was that

You're right -- I don't think there's any such limitation in the code, so
that's pretty weird. What version is this? And what do you mean by "it first
installed in the / partition"? You *will* need to have a / partition, of
course.


> /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab were not set up so I could just edit it to put
> the right information in, so I was stuck, since there appeared to be no
> documentation on how to set it up. It appears that once you use DD,
> everything is written in stone and there is no turning back.

Disk Druid isn't smart enough to have any particular way of writing anything
in stone, so I don't think that's it.

> So, I tried the installation again. What it decided then to do is wipe out
> the partition table after only instructing it to mount the partitions and
> not reformat them (it didn't ask before doing so) and set up new
> partitions in their place.
> 
> What I want to know is, why insist on ONLY using DD for configuring the
> HDs? And why was /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab mucked with so much and not
> documented?

This is a strange, strange question. It's like saying "Why insist on only
using Anaconda to install Fedora?" No one's *insisting* -- it's just the
tool that's provided.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 74 degrees Fahrenheit.