Installing Mandriva 2010 on my home machine I ran into a little issue during installation.
I had told it to use the 5th hard drive on my machine, which already had a single Linux partition on it. Not needing this, I told the installer to “use entire drive” but the next thing I knew, it was formatting a completely different drive.
Upon closer inspection, it actually ended up writing a bizarre partition structure to the drive I actually told it to use:
[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sde
Disk /dev/sde: 300.1 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xdd13fc46Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 * 1 1 0 0 Empty
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sde2 * 1 1 0 0 Empty
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sde3 * 1 1 0 0 Empty
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sde4 * 1 1 0 0 Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
And then this is the drive it actually used!
[root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 1568 12594928+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 1569 60801 475789072+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdc5 1569 2077 4088511 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc6 2078 60801 471700498+ 83 Linux
Gasp!
Update: I should mention that I didn’t lose any data from that drive, but I do wonder how many others have had this issue.
4 thoughts on “Not that drive, Mandriva. No!”
Ouch. So you lost all the data on the different drive?
Thankfully there was nothing important on there.. Still, I wonder if anyone else has been bitten by this bug!
-c
“I should mention that I didn’t lose any data from that drive, but I do wonder how many others have had this issue”
I haven’t seen one bug report like this (though I don’t go through all the bug reports).
But, if people don’t report bugs, it’s hard to know …
If you still have the logs from the installation under /root/drakx, then you really should file a bug if you are interested in seeing it fixed.
The only thing I have in there is an updates.log file..
[chris@shem ~]$ sudo ls -la /mnt/tmp/root/drakx/total 24
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 2009-12-09 20:28 .
drwx------ 8 root root 4096 2009-12-09 21:46 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13019 2009-12-09 20:32 updates.log