can't boot fresh install

[Alan Evans]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 7:12 AM, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Alan Evans wrote:
>>
>> Ok. Given the totality of my experience so far combined with the many
>> replies I've received in this thread, I was inclined to believe that
>> starting with a Mac-formatted disk was really causing me serious
>> trouble.
>>
>> I really need a working system here, so i decided to save an image of
>> the hard drive and start fresh. I dd'd the hard drive onto another,
>> external drive in case I ever wanted it back, then I used fdisk to fix
>> the apparently broken partition table. For good measure, I even
>> created a dummy partition and ran mke2fs on it to assure the drive was
>> in good shape.
>>
> Instead of using fdisk, use parted to create an empty partition, and
> then copy your installed partition back to the drive. parted will
> take care of all the little booking details so tha things should
> work. It is also faster then dd because it does not need to copy the
> unused parts of the partition - it understands file systems.

Sorry it took me so long to reply to this; I have to sleep and go to
work at least sometimes.

Pre-creating partitions didn't help. The installer still choked on it
claiming that the partition table was messed up.

So I tried your suggested of writing zeros over the beginning of the
drive, not very hopeful. But it worked! The install proceeded without
a hitch and the PC booted the installed OS. (Add fanfare.)

However, now that the system is running, fdisk reports:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          26      204800   83  Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              26       24321   195153601   8e  Linux LVM

So I'm still confused about the disagreement between fdisk and
anaconda regarding how to lay down a partition table. Being an
old-school kind of guy, I'm inclined to believe fdisk, but I don't
really know how to confirm it one way or the other. The most important
thing to me is that the system is running and my wife can leave me
alone about getting online!

-Alan