SLES 9.3 geometry and initialize after Windows install
Hi, I've come across a curious effect and have a solution, but would like some confirmation, or commentary. Symptom: hardware - 32 bit i386 SLES9.3, fibre channel volume using qla2300 hba, devoid of any partition table. Windows 2000 is installed upon it then SLES 9.3 is installed upon it, completely wiping out windows partitions using autoyast and <initialize> true. Installation proceeds for a while then halts with the message "insufficient space to continue". Using ALT+F6 to get to the console, the root partition / is sized to 1.1 GB out of 10 GB where autoyast was told to use <auto> and <max> for the partitions, it should be much larger, a lot of the disk space is unpartitioned. If the SLES 9.3 installation is tried again, it succeeds, and the partitions now use the whole disk. Solution: Looking over /var/log/YaST/y2log, the hardware detect phase seems to detect the drive geometry based on something the Windows 2000 install leaves in the partition table, and makes its calculations based on that. Even if none of the windows partitions are saved, and then the partition table is <re-initialized> with a linux partition table. Using <initialize> true </initialize> causes the problem. Using <initialize> false </initialize> does not cause the problem. Thoughts: browsing the y2log file of a failure and success, it appears the disk geometry is acquired "before" the partition is re-initialized with a linux partition "type" table, in the windows->sles9.3 failure the cyclinders are reported as 1274, in the sles9.3->sles9.3 success they are reported as 9997. They are both correct as the windows type geometry has one set of CHS and the linux type geometry has a different set of CHS. the solution wouldn't bother me except the thought of having no control over the actual disk geometry used by the autoyast installer, is there a way of overriding the hardware detection of disk geometry? or a way of triggering a new disk geometry acquisition after the partition table is initialized and before the partitions are auto-calculated? (I'd guess the right thing would have been for "initialize" to occur before hardware geometry detect.) but i think my preference would be access from a pre-script to modify or provide the values I choose for CHS to the autoyast installer, but I don't know how to access the hardware detect information thats acquired before the pre-script. Would it be in a staging log somewhere? Thanks for any considerations. And I sincerely apologize if this belongs in a developers forum.
On Monday 03 July 2006 15:31, John Willis wrote:
I've come across a curious effect and have a solution, but would like some confirmation, or commentary.
yes, that's a known problem and it is fixed with SLES10 With SLES9 SP4 (not available yet) you can use a pre-script to change the partitioning like this "parted <diskdevice> mklabel msdos" to workaround that problem. -- ciao, Uwe Gansert Uwe Gansert, Server Technologies Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, D-90409 Nuernberg, Germany Business: http://www.suse.de/~ug now playing Diary Of Dreams - Deviation
participants (2)
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John Willis
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Uwe Gansert