Fedora 18 installer does not recognize existing partitions

Question

The fedora 18 installer shows no partitions at all, and it shows all of my hard disk space as free.

I opened a terminal from the live USB drive i'm using to install it, and issue the fdisk -l command, it shows the correct partition setup.

What could be causing this?

Solution 1

I did install Fedora 18 on a machine using Windows XP.

To do so I first modified the original only partition used totally by Windows and created partitions for Fedora 18 using GParted ( http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php )

From almost 100 GB I left only 32 for Windows (/dev/sda1, ntfs) and made a separate 4 GB patrition for My Documents (/dev/sda2, ntfs). The rest for Fedora this way

/dev/sda3 ext4 /boot 256 MB /dev/sda4 extended /dev/sda5 swap swap 2 GB /dev/sda6 ext4 / 4 GB /dev/sda7 ext4 /usr 16 GB /dev/sda8 ext4 /usr/local 4 GB /dev/sda9 ext4 /var 3 GB /dev/sda10 ext4 /tmp 1 GB /dev/sda11 ext4 /home 40 GB

After that I started Fedora 18 installation from a DVD. Within Anaconda * In the main menu I selected Keyboard layout, software to be included -all other options were selected by default Then, in the partition area + selected the disk + selected the type of partition to standard + told Anaconda I wanted no help in doing the partition + then clicked on Claim free space button +

Anaconda did recognize partition and showed this partition as Unknown, the ntfs included. It recognized the labels as I had defined them in GParted. Then it was only matter of setting mount points with the exact names as the labels. And check in Reformat box. I didn't cypher data so not to mess around.

As I clicked on Apply changes button, the partition was moved in the left box to the New Fedora Installation area at the top. It automatically separated data partitions (/usr/local and /home) from system partitions.

Checking the Finish partitioning button brought me back to main menu and Fedora 18 installation run seamlessly.

Solution 2

I don't know if the Fedora 18 installer is susceptible to this problem, but the symptom you report is common in libparted-based tools that run into either of two problems:

• Leftover RAID data
• Damaged partition tables

IIRC, dmraid -E will fix the former problem -- but you should be 100% sure that you're not using any sort of RAID setup before doing this!

The second problem can have a number of sub-causes. Note that fdisk is less fussy about its partitions than is libparted, so fdisk will show the disk, and might not even show any obvious signs of problems, even when there's subtle damage. My FixParts program will detect and correct several common problems on MBR disks, so if you're using MBR, it might be worth running FixParts to see if it will fix the problems. Be sure that FixParts has detected and included all of your partitions, though; for some types of problems (like overlapping partitions), FixParts will fix the problem by deleting one or more partitions!

Solution 3

It is always a good idea to leave the partition for installing Linux "unallocated". Then the installer will automatically install there.

Comments

[ymn]

what partition table you use? GPT or MBR?

[haroldmoma]

I use MBR as the partition table