Hello again.
I'm back from the abyss that is the fedora core installer on a drive that has an existing freebsd partition...and...I'm now short one perfectly good installation of slack9.0, but it's ok, I've got 9.1 and 10 to comfort me ;^) and folks, please join us in praying for Patrick's full and speedy recovery.
anyway:
I pre-formatted /dev/hda1 from slack9.1 with a mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 and told the fedora installer to not format it or even the swap partition either, anaconda happily complied.
Results: (/dev/hda3 is my freebsd partition)
"Error informing the kernel about modifications to partition /dev/hda3 - Device or resource busy . This means linux won't know about any changes you made to /dev/hda3 until you reboot so you shouldn't mount it or use it in any way before rebooting".
This had ignore/cancel as options, so I chose "ignore" since my freebsd part was obviously not mounted and thus changing it somehow via the fedcore 3 installer running off cd would have been quite a feat, ay?
Next I got this nifty dialog box, entitled:
"Exception occured" (the wrong spelling is fedora 3's not mine, they get it right in the message below)
"An unhandled exception occurred. This is most likely a bug. Please copy the full text of this exception and file a detailed bug report against anaconda at
http://someurl.com. Error: error informing the kernel about modifications to partition /dev/hda3"
I still end up feeling like fedora 3 is trying to add my freebsd partition(slices) to it's fstab and finding it's freebsd partition reading/file reading capabilities to be lacking (though I'm not sure how/why this would be), but yet refusing to simply drop that part from fstab when it encounters an error.
any ideas?
thanks for listening