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Title: YaST and fdisk

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YaST and fdisk

Problem:

During (first) installation you try to modify the partition table of your local harddisk. But before the changes have been written to disk, YaST complains about a non-successful installation.

Cause:

The cause of the problem is not completely clear. Feedback on this is welcome, especially: which fdisk has been used for creating the partitions? In known cases up to now, MS-DOS 7.0 fdisk has been a prime factor for creating problems...

Furthermore using the 32bit extensions of DOS resp. Windows fdisk with an extended partition seems to be extremely error prone, as it not only modifies the partition-entry itself but the whole partition table.

As one of our customers told us, Windows 95 fdisk creates partitions with ID 93. Linux-fdisk sometimes sees an f unknown partition type and is not able to create any logical partitions in this partition.

Obviously, YaST gets unusual feedback from fdisk. An extension of Linux-fdisk is in the works.

Solution:

There are four possible solutions:

1. Try to set the correct partition type (ID 83) for the yet-to-be-installed partitions, even if you did not create them with Linux. If this does not work, try one of the following.

2. Execute fdisk directly from a shell prompt. When it comes to partitioning your harddisk, change to another virtual console using Alt-F2. Then start fdisk manually. Some of the more important fdisk commands:

   m

   Help

   p

   shows the current partition table

   n

   Create new partition

   d

   delete partition

   a

   activate a partition for booting

   l

   list available partition types

   t

   set partition type

   q

   quit without saving

   w

   write changes to disk

   Use Alt-F1 to switch back to YaST.

3. First start the "rescue system" (look in the manual or index for details). After that use Linux-fdisk manually to create the necessary partitions.

4. Before starting Linux create the partitions using another fdisk-like tool. Later on only change the partition type to the correct type with Linux-fdisk. You may use - at your own risk - the program pfdisktc from the directory dosutils on the first CD of the set.

5. Create the partitions with the Windows or DOS fdisk but do not use the 32bit extensions.

Credits for feedback on this goes to Thomas Schein and Matthias Kraft.

See also:

Partitions: Distribution of filesystems
YaST crashes when reading the description files
YaST aborts when reading the description files
Error message after leaving YaST on S.u.S.E. Linux 5.0
YaST: Error during installation of S.u.S.E Linux 5.1

Keywords: YAST, FDISK, PARTITION, INSTALLATION, NTFS, VFAT, FAT32, MSDOS, WINDOWSNT, WINDOWS95

Feedback welcome: Send Mail to ke@suse.de (Please give the following subject: SDB-ke_yast-fdisk)

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