Hi Jeff, all.. Three notes i have, one of them somewhat 'bitter' i'm afraid. First of all i found out about this bug by being hit by it .. Unfortunatly i only have one machine here and needed to get work on it done, so without knowledge of how to fix this, all that was left to me was to whipe my partitions completely, losing a bit of data and work in the process, and re-installing. Now this leads to my actual question.. Is it really smart to leave FC2 out there when this scenario will probably hit a lot of people? Not everyone has many computers setup you know, and completely hoosing you system is probably enough to make people somewhat non sympathetic to what seems to have caused it (fedora in this case). I know i had to swallow hard and take a very deep breath when it hit me Secondly these notes do mostly seemed geared towards quite advanced users? Specificly "..you should use a utility that can read the drive geometry" .. I think you've lost quite a bit of your target audiance there already.. What utility, what do those values mean, how to use those values in the workaround.. ? Last i'm missing the part about recovery.. I've read in the bug and in the email threads that you could use sfdisk (which can be usable by booting the install/rescue cd, going into rescue mode, installing sfdisk, and running that command..). Shouldnt we include a guide on how to do that to? While i do think its great btw to send out a major call to read this info, with a guide to how to prevent and/or recover from it. I am to put it mildly, quite supprised the 'Fedora Project' allows this bug to exist in cd's that anyone can just download.. However well we describe the fix/workarounds and spread the news, it will not reach a lot of people.. Nevermind about people who just want to try linux out. I remeber the times when serious dataloss was considered a show-stopper bug.. Having had the experiance of having lost data and work due to this bug, it's easy to call this data loss.. So in my eyes a _serious_ show stopper for this release.. Recall is what my voice will shout if anyone will listen; Or atleast patch the installers on the cd to detect the miss-alignment and refuse to take any further actions or install.. Really how's it gonna look to the world: "Hey we have this great new release, but installing it might mean having to do high-tech complicated workarounds or reinstalling your complete system" ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta@xxxxxxxxx> To: <fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 20:58 Subject: Call for Discussion: Summary document concerning Prevention andRecovery of XP Dual Boot Problems Okay, a generous community member has been so kind as to write a summary document outlining prevention and recovery on systems where the infamous harddrive geometry installer bug causes problems with XP dual booting. Please, read over the attached document and test the preventative and recovery methods outlined. Suggestions on useful textual edits and corrections to make before this is widely broadcast are welcome. This is important enough of an issue to make sure the information in here is non-toxic before we broadcast a version of this widely, the goal being to prevent all unncessary dataloss. Of particular interest: 1)test the preventative measure if you still have access to a machine where this is a problem. Prevention is always better, if it can be done reliably. 2)finding a better workaround stdisk warning messages that are being produced that intefere with simple sfdisk command pipe recovery. -jef"Die CHS Die!"spaleta ------------------->Begin Summary Document Text<---------------------------- Dual Booting Issues With Fedora Core 2 and Windows: Prevention & Recovery NOTICE: Please read this document in its entirety. This guide was inspired by the solution developed by Radu Cornea and Alexandre Oliva in this thread: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg02114.html . This guide aims to integrate the original solution with the refinements evolved in that thread. This guide offers an explanation of why the refinements are beneficial and some workarounds to problems that may prevent the uninitiated from using the solution. It also provides a means of preventing the problem entirely. Primer: There is a bug in Fedora Core 2 that causes the hard disk geometry as reported in the partition table to be altered during installation. This change may cause Windows boot failure. Although this bug is severe, it is recoverable and no data should be lost. It is important not to panic if and when this happens so you do not cause further problems or cause actual loss of data in the process of recovering from the error. Prevention: This bug can be avoided entirely by using some preventative steps while installing Fedora Core 2. Thanks go out to Cero (cero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) for discovery and testing of this solution. To avoid the hard disk geometry to be altered you may enter it manually during installation by using the hdN=<drive geometry> parameter (where N is the letter representing the drive with the MBR you will use). To discover the current geometry before installing Fedora Core 2 you should use a utility that can read the drive geometry as reported in the partition table= ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- > -- > fedora-devel-list mailing list > fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx > http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list >
