Hi all, I hope this helps someone. I.m posting a new short thread hoping it will save alot of searching. I went thru hell after losing my XP part's yesterday. My bad, I should have read up before blindly installing FC2. To keep it short, I switched my hdd detection from 'auto' to 'LBA' in bios. I'm using maxtor 80 gb, 7200's, 8mb cache. After doing this winxp and fc2 are both residing and booting issue free. I did default installs aswell, no changes to anything. I would LOVE to link to the thread I saw that suggestion in, but it was 2 a.m. when I found it and ....well, thanks to the gent who mentioned this! Peace

Here is an article that explains how to fix the problem:

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

Thanks jailbait, As stated-next time I'll research First

I'm still having problems with this issue - both with Fedora FC1 and FC2. The box already has Mandrake 10 Community installed along with Win XP Home and I would like to add Fedora to the mix. System has been running with Mandrake in this config w/out problems since Mandrake 8.0. I've successfully installed Mandrake 8.2, 9.0, 9.2 and now 10.0. Fedora is the only distro giving me grief about my partitioning.

My system has a MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard, and according to the BIOS, LBA is active on the two 40 GB maxtor drives. (Is there any way to check this at the kernel level?) My disk geometry from sfdisk -d is this:

sfdisk -d
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
# partition table of /dev/hda
unit: sectors

/dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 20482812, Id= c, bootable <<< WinXP vfat
/dev/hda2 : start= 20482875, size= 30716280, Id= f <<< extended
/dev/hda3 : start= 51199155, size= 26973135, Id= c <<<< windows d: ntfs
/dev/hda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/hda5 : start= 20482938, size= 30716217, Id= 7 <<<< windows e: vfat
# partition table of /dev/hdb
unit: sectors

/dev/hdb1 : start= 63, size= 19534977, Id=83, bootable <<<< Mandrake 10.0 /
/dev/hdb2 : start= 19535040, size= 1959930, Id= 5
/dev/hdb3 : start= 21494970, size= 42009975, Id= c <<<< VFAT (Windows user files)
/dev/hdb4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/hdb5 : start= 19535103, size= 1959867, Id=82 <<<< Swap

A little screwy, but it evolved this way rather than being designed.

I still get the warning about the partitions being out of alignment. I wanted to use the Fedora FC2 iso's on my disk so I burned the boot.iso. This boots, I can specify hda=4866,63,255 (and hdb) and I *still* get popups from parted during install that geometry is bad and I can Ignore or Cancel. If I ignore, the anaconda script goes into an infinite loop with 99% cpu. If I cancel, it gets to a point where it says it will destroy my whole disk.

I notice that System Rescue CD 2.6 parted (1.6.3) doesn't complain, yet FC2 1.6.6 and FC1's both complain. Is the problem really with parted?

From my laptop:

Notice it says LBA=yes. This computer is dual boot with XP and working but PartitionMagic is complaining now but did not before the FC2 install. I do not know if this is quite what you were asking, it does seem to show that LBA is in use.