Re: Parted hates my partition table, can't update to Fedora Core

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi William,

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 04:45:30PM -0700, William Studenmund wrote:
> In the process of updating a RedHat 7.3 system to Fedora Core, I 
> discovered that parted doesn't like my partition table, and so I can't 
> update. The machine triple boots Linux, NetBSD, and Windows, so wiping 
> the partition table isn't an option.
> 
> Also unfortunately, parted's error message is not illuminating. It 
> complains, "Error: Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition." 
> It neither tells me what constraints are at issue, nor how it can't 
> satisfy them. Even when I ask it to just print a partition, it gives 
> that error complaint. "help" is the only parted command I've found that 
> doesn't report an error, though I didn't try all the command options. 
> ;-)
> 
> The partition table was worked on by both the NetBSD and Windows 
> partitioning tools, then I used Disk Druid under RedHat 7.3 to finish 
> partitioning. Linux's main file system is in the primary partition 
> table, and its swap and var (and since this is a Dell, the Dell startup 
> partition) are in extended partitions. For some reason, Disk Druid made 
> one extended partition, then sub-partitions which were also extended, 
> then put these last three partitions in there.
> 
> I do know that the NetBSD partition doesn't end on a cylinder boundary, 
> but I really don't care.
> 
> I'd appreciate any help in getting this working.
> 
> As per the documentation, I'm appending the output of fdisk /dev/hda 
> -l, interactively using fdisk to get the partition and expert partition 
> tables, and a hand-copy of parted's output.

Thanks for the report :)

I've pasted the fdisk output for everyone's convenience:

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             5       876   7000000   a9  NetBSD
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(875, 117, 14) should be (875, 254, 63)
/dev/hda2           877      1687   6510341    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda3          1687      2452   6144000   83  Linux
/dev/hda4          2452      2468    133399    5  Extended
/dev/hda5          2452      2468    133367+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6          2469      2472     32098+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/hda7          2473      2498    208813+  83  Linux

The problem seems to be that partitions 6 and 7 aren't inside the
extended partition.  I can't think of any painless way to fix this.
Perhaps delete partitions 4, 5, 6 and 7 and recover them with gpart?

Cheers,
Andrew