Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Hello all, this is somewhat of an annoyance and I hope this is the
correct mailing list on which to post regarding it. I will describe
There is a kickstart list for this sort of thing.
the most recent scenario in which this happened to me:
I installed RHEL4 U5 x86_64 onto a blade within a PowerEdge 1955 via
Kickstart. The system was brand new and contained Dell's utility
partitions still. My kickstart config file's disk section looks like
the following:
autopart
bootloader --location=mbr --append="rhgb quiet"
The GUI installer uses my kickstart defaults and I was able to modify
the layout the partitioning tool had given me to remove the Dell
utility partitions and then to recreate the Linux filesystem layout. I
did so without LVM. Ended up with partitions sda1, 2 and 3 for /boot,
swap and / respectively.
After a couple days we needed to reinstall this machine.
I started up a kickstart install again using the same config file as
above, but this time the GUI installer gave me the following when I got
to the partitioning section at the beginning of installation:
"Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions as primary
partitions"
The only option I was given was to reboot the system.
I tried commenting out the "autopart" line in my kickstart config file,
but met with the same results.
The only way I could proceed was to either
a) Not use kickstart at all (a manual installation let me partition
by hand without error)
b) Use fdisk to wipe out my partitions ahead of time.
I feel like this situation should be handled better by anaconda --
there should be an option other than reboot as it would be trivial to
clear the partitions out from within the partition editor.
Yes, the obvious thing is to use clearpart --all, but in some cases I
may not want to wipe out every partition. The installer should make
its best effort to auto-partition with any free space available and
present the user with the option to adjust if necessary.
At the very least it does not seem necessary to force me to reboot.
I have also run into this issue with existing Windows partitions on the
system, etc.
Is this a potential bug or am I misunderstanding something simple here?
It's not clear to me that you've read and understood the documentation
on partitioning. There are more options than you have mentioned; some
address your immediate problem and others others.
Anaconda's partitioning is fairly feeble, but the cases where it breaks
down are more complicated than yours.
One important feature Anaconda lacks is the ability to resize other
(particularly ntfs) partitions. Where I need to do that, I boot
something else such as Knoppix/
--
Cheers
John
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