Re: beta won't install onto raw scsi drives
On Sat, Jun 27, 1998 at 11:00:36AM -0500, Richard E. Hawkins Esq. wrote:
[...]
> Partitioning the hard disks was not possible from within the program. It
> simply announced that fdisk was unable to format the disks.
>
> I switched to the second console, and looked at them with fdisk. Or tried :)
> They spewed more than a screeenful of data, but the gist was that all for
> partitions were not on boundaries. These disks had not been formatted; we
> bought the machine without an OS.
>
> By blindly deleting all four partitions on each drive, fdisk was able to go
> happily about it's business.
>
> My suggestion would be rather than bombing with no message (or one that
> doesn't ask for an acknowledgement, and thus just flashes by), that, if
> unable to execute, fdisk as called from the installation package ask
> for permission to delete all partitions on the hard disk.
You have found a bug in cfdisk. If the partition table is horribly broken
(as usual for new, unformatted disks) cfdisk segfaults (at least it
segfaulted last time I checked, a few months ago). fdisk is more solid,
so it runs and let you clean the mess in the partition table.
Unfortunately, fdisk is a bit "user-unfriendly", so it's cfdisk the one
that is called from the installation package.
A possible solution (other than fixing the bug in cfdisk, something that
we should try to do anyway) is calling fdisk if cfdisk fails.
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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