Disk Partitioning Question F-18
 

I have this setupI want to install Fedora Electronic Spin on sda5 (which wants 7.15G) and the space is there but the stupid installer won't let me. I did try the "Go Away and play in the traffic - I'll do it!" option but it doesn't want to know and won't let me assign any partitions. It wants the Full Disk for itself. It refuses to see sda5 as empty; If I try to delete it, it's "delete all the other partitions as well" or "Go back." What's the deal??

How about you change those [quote] tags to [code]?.
Fedora has always been a bit "interesting" in its partition options in Anaconda - and with F18 they decided to re-write it (Anaconda) ...

I've yet to do a full install - I only have a few systems I don't really care about. I'll try re-installing over a F18 I Fedup'd the other day and see what it look like.

Strange request, but done. Is there some advantage, or is it just more ethically correct?

I got to read stuff like "No more do you have to mess with partitions . . . WE worry about all that stuff for you." and I got seriously scared. That's a 60G ssd formatted mbr with secure boot disabled. I had to take a session with gparted to get a slice for Fedora at all. I have a working backup. but I don't want to use it again.

An alternative is to put back the original hard disk in that box. This has 6 partitions devoted to windows 8 and is gpt formatted, which switches on UEFI in this Samsung box. I have shrunk the drive C and made a few linux partitions, and fedora could live there - if it would get going. That's the big IF. . .

Have you Fedora on a UEFI box?

Hmmmm - you can't see the difference ?. Now the data maintains its alignment - much more beneficial if you want people to help you.That was going to be my next question - they seem to have had some issues getting the UEFI code correct.
Short answer, no - I'll have to build another test box. About time I did some UEFI testing anyway.

I'm a normal Slackware user, and they're still at the 'maybe we'd better do something about this uefi thing. . . ' stage. The SSD has mbr format, which switches off secure booting here.

I have a uefi box. I switched off secure boot (Legacy OS & Secure boot was the best I could do). It came with
sda1 - boot recovery partition
sda2 - Secure Boot Partition
sda3 - unrecognizable 128MB M$ hidden (backup of their keys?)
sda4 - "Drive C:" I shrunk this and made a few linux partitions.
sda5,6 - Windows recovery stuff

It has windows 8 which is unspeakably horrid and awful. I have a 17.3" screen and windows 8 thinks it's on a mobile phone. I parked this whole disk, but can revert to it if needed. This Thread is fairly informative on the issues with windows 8 in particular.

I have to admit it wasn't very clear, but I was able to install to a specific partition. I'll try to remember/explain how I did it.

To create a custom layout when the installer came up I went to the screen that shows the hard drive(s). Once there I selected the drive and clicked on Continue. This was one of those, "hope I'm doing the right thing moments", because I was thinking it might select the whole drive and go for an installation. Instead it came to another screen showing my installations. In my case I had F17 on sda1 and F16 on sda2.

My goal was to do a fresh install on sda2 and replace F16. It wouldn't let me select that partition outright, I had to open the F16 layout and then select the partition inside of it. Once selected I used the - button on the left to remove the partition from that layout. It then removed the F16 layout and made that partition available to me. After that I was able to select it as my / mount point for the F18 install.

This is from memory and I did have a few beers in me, so sorry if it isn't exactly step by step. I may try this again just to see if it makes more sense than it did the first time. If you run into anything please post back. I'd like to know how you made out.

I found more details on partitioning in the installation guide of all places. :)

Check out section 9.10 Storage and partitioning and section 9.13 Creating a Custom Partition Layout.

There was a check box I missed in my previous post (Let me customize the partitioning of disks instead)

I have taken the advice, read the links and come in armed with the information and your guidance, only to retire in defeat.

/Venting
I have Slackware-14.0, with swap, /, /boot, & /home partitions. I wanted to add Fedora, Reusing the swap, /boot, & /home partitions. I cannot assign any partition in a manner that surprises it, and reusing a partition surprises it. the '-' function works, the '+'seems congenitally broken, and it has the irritating manner of a m$ installer gone wrong. It is not prepared to let me reuse /boot, swap, or /home.
/End Venting

I only have a 60G ssd and wanted 2 systems on it. I can't live in Fedora anymore; whenever I let it update, it downloads a few hundred mb and breaks the system. F17 had a broken trousers at one point :-//. How can I take that seriously? I just want to visit occasionally. It will have to be the live disk.

Thanks for your help, guys. I'm not marking this solved, because it isn't solved but I will get out of your face. Please feed back my frustration to the cloud that the installer was written on:-).

Please create an account (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/createaccount.cgi) and do that yourself (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi).

Ahhhh - I was wondering about that /boot.

Several releases ago, Anaconda starting using /boot as a "scratchpad" to download stuff to. Minimum 500Meg these days I think.
Try going with everything under / for Fedora (no separate /boot) - see if it let's you mount that and proceed.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=902275

It won't let me reuse swap or /home. Because I have sda5 as /fedora in Slackware's /etc/fstab, I can't do it. If I removed that line, I do believe I might get going. We still have the fight about swap, and I lose. But having /home on the 15G partition is a non runner, because the first thing I am going to do is enlarge that with numerous schematics, and I'm close to the limits already. It would have 7-9G for /fedora, 6G + the rest for home, and swap as well in a 15G partition?

Why can't they do a simple thing that lets me choose the partition I'm setting, (sda1 - sda6) and what it's doing. I am telling it to play in the traffic, I'll worry about this. This installer will never make it out of alpha.
It's like m$ windows. You have to install it first.

OK - I left this with being told to post a bug

Bug 902275 has 32 posts and counting. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'd like to install the $#@£! thing (The Electronic Spin) and do some work. I went to F-17 in an attempt to get going but the kernel panics early "Unknown option root=805" Root IS NOT set to 805


A spin is a spin - NO rpms/ dir and instead I have 1.9G of a squashfs.img.
Can somebody give me the commend line way of doing that?
/guessing
cd / #new fedora root
gunzip /path/to/squashfs.img |cpio -d - ??

Thanks for reporting that bug. Unsurprisingly there's another thread recent detailing problems with the new installer and reduced functionality wrt the partitioning tool. Anyway, last time I wanted to boot a Gparted Live CD from disk (using legacy GRUB) I extracted the RAM disk and the initrd image and added an entry to /boot/grub/grub.conf like this:
That worked for me for a number of Live CDs including DBAN. What doesn't work I tend to run as a virtualization guest. Other options include GRUB2 as it seems to be able to boot from an ISO.

Thanks for that - I didn't have those kernel options.

I'm solved, after a lame fashion. I gave up on the installer, and paid attention to the squashfs.img. From Slackware-14.0 the following transaction
lands it on the disk, jammy side down, no doubt. I'll look at the issues, write an fstab, and maybe get booting tomorrow. I won't connect the network - I might run 'yum update' in a moment of madness and get in 300MB of updates which break the system, which is what usually happens. Then I can live in Slackware, but do a project in Fedora.

EDIT: I'm just soo glad I included squashfs in this kernel!

My recent experience with grub2 has been horrible.

F-17 had a doc which said "It doesn't really work, but we're supplying it anyway. . ." I found a plethora of install, setup, look-and-see scripts which inevitably barfed for the lack of something that should have been installed. So I could achieve squat with it. As for handling EFI? No way.