FC 5 and 300 gig drive partitioning difficulties
 

During a fresh install of FC 5 the partitioning application (Disk Druid?)will only recognize the 300 gig hard drive using a device-mapper. Is this normal? I believe this is part of a LVM partitioning scheme, but I do not want to use LVM.

By default, Fedora installs using LVM2. If you don't want to use a LV, you need to re-install Fedora and select the manual partitioning option.

If you've already "tuned" your system and don't want to mess that all up, you can "undo" the LV, but it's fairly complicated involving, among other things, regenerating the boot image.

Unfortunately, there is no manual install option for FC 5. There is the option to create a custom configuration. However, the custom configuration only allows the 300 gig to be treated as if it were a LVM device. Interestingly the other two 150 gig drives on the machine were not treated as LVM devices. Could LVM be FC 5's method of overcoming some partition size barrier?

Ooh wait! now it doesn't see the drive at all! It did 45 seconds ago! hmmm. I'll have to get back with you on this. I might have a whole new set of issues :scratch:

I still wonder if there is a partition size barrier -- otherwise I'd delete this post.

Obviously, I don't know why your drive vanished.

But my recollection of the install partitioning tools is that the choice to use a logical volume has nothing to do with the volume size. If you don't want LVM, just choose "manual" partitioning, create a (small, say 1 Gb) swap partition, another small (< 500 Mb) boot ext3 (or whatever you like) partition, a moderate (say 100 Gb) root partition, and use the remainder for /home. (You don't, actually, need a separate /home partition, but it can simplify dump setup for your backups.)

Thanks PTrenholme,

I'd like to do a "manual" install and partition the drive myself! But FC 5 installer does not offer that as an option. My options are:

I'm using three drives: two 150 gig drives and one 300 gig drive. If I select "create custom layout," The two 150 are listed as hda and hdc, and I can partition them as I wish. (hdb is my DVD.) However; the 300 gig drive shows up as "/dev/mapper/pdc_dfjhahgcfg" not hdd as I'd expect.

In previous attempts I've tried leaving the 300 gig out of the initial install, and then using fdisk to partition hdd. No luck. fdisk reads the drive as dev/mapper/pdc_dfjhahgcfg.

Why don't I just go ahead and use LVM you might ask. I'm using this box to learn Mythtv and Plutohome. Both of these are developmental project and I expect that the OS will be trashed fairly often. I'd like to keep my data: music, picture and video files on separate drives and unassociated with LVs.

Oh! and the lost drive (mentioned previously) was due to a bad cable.

Ah. I often have to reset my cables, too.

As to why it shows up in /dev/mapper, I suspect that it has a LV partition on it.

In any case, you should also have it listed as /dev/hdb or /dev/hdd (assuming you've cabled is as a "slave" after hda or hdc).

That won't show up in the install, but, if you can boot, for example, in "rescue" mode, you should be able to delete any partition information present on the drive. Then the install should go with no problems.

Actually, since you seem to have at last one working system, or a live DVD, since you're accessing the internet, try mounting the drive on your working system and deleting any partition information on the drive.

I've tried fdisk and also a low level format utility to zero-fill all the drives. No luck; I still get hda, hdc and mapper/pdc_dfhahgcfg for the third drive.

On a hunch that the mobo wanted to break the drive down into a raid array of some sort, I disabled all the raid utilities in the mobo utilitities. No luck.

I'm beginning to think that this is a bug in FC 5 X86_64. I just ran Disk Druid in FC 4 and low and behold, "/dev/hdd (286181 MB)(Model:Maxtor 6L300R0)" shows up bright as day.

I'll install FC 4 X86_64 and then upgrade to FC 5. Sound like a good plan?

Well, maybe. First check the bug reports, and, if you don't find it, report it.

Also, consider waiting 'till FC6 is released on the 11th. (Or try installing FC6RC3 now, planing to upgrade to FC6 when it is released next week.) The rumor is that lots of these "small" bugs were fixed in FC6, and you'd at least be moving forward.