On Thursday 12 February 2009, Paul W. Frields wrote: >On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 04:06:38PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: >> I have never figured out why you people hate fdisk so much. Back when you >> called it disk druid or some such it was a PIMA, and while the face is now >> a lot prettier, it is just as terminally broken in its heart as ever. > >I believe Anaconda uses parted these days. > >> And all you have to do is get past the 199meg limit for /boot that the F8 >> installer insisted on. Use fdisk to set it up bigger, and the installer >> would not recognize it. > >I just got out my Fedora 8 installation DVD and popped it into a >virtual machine to test how the installation worked. Here's what I >think happened to you: > >When you select "Create a custom layout," the installer pre-populates >a starting partition layout for you -- a slightly less than 200 MB >/boot partition, and the rest of the drive allocated for a single LVM >physical partition, containing a single LVM volume group, with a swap >partition and a root (/) partition, which most people would then set >up for all the other partitions as needed. > >If you don't delete that LVM partition, which in the layout starts >right after the pre-set /boot partition, you can't set the /boot >partition any higher -- because there's nowhere left to increase >into. > >If you delete the LVM volume group and then the physical partition, >and then delete the /boot partition and truly start from scratch, you >can size that /boot partition as high as you like. I just ran the >installation this way with a 400 MB /boot partition and it worked like >a charm. I did all that Paul, deleted the LVM, then everything else in descending order until the displayed map was empty. I could create a 500MB first partition just fine, but when I added the next primary, a 2GB swap starting at the end of the /boot assignment, the bar map then said /boot was 199Megs. I did that about 4 times before I gave up and accepted that I was stuck with a /boot partition that I knew was not gonna be big enough. Silly Q? Can I, right now, do a swapoff -a, call fdisk and get the params for that swap, edit them to move its starting cylinder inward, write that, and then go back and give that to the /boot partition? It currently looks like this: Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000ccaf5 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 26 547 4192965 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb3 548 60801 483990255 83 Linux Obviously I'll need to backup the boot someplace, do a mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1 and then copy it all back. Is fdisk even capable of that, or gparted for that matter, I haven't tried it myself. Looks like fdisk could, and parted could, after making the correct backups. Ok, I have the old 400GB deathstar (/dev/sdc) setup similar to what I want, now to see if I can install a 64 bit system on it. Humm, what do I do to /boot/grub/device.map?, which now looks like this: # this device map was generated by anaconda (hd0) /dev/sdb -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines