So let me get this straight, You have at least 6 psrtitons already defined and you are basically recreating partitions where others already were. It is no wonder they did not get moved by the capriciousness of DD. It had to fit them around the other pre-existing partitons.
Correct, I thought the problem was with new partitions being placed and changed. I guess I was mistaken that this problem affected systems in that partitions where being mislabeled and that they were being misconfigured. Maybe I'm lucky and it did not mess up my system. And I did not use fdisk to setup my system before I deleted and changed my partitions. I guess that I will have to dig out my RH9 "spare" disk and blow it away to a clean disk.
Again, I guess that I'm blessed and either my twenty years of experience sets me aside, or I did not do what caused the error. Again, I can dig out the drive and blow it away and reinstall FC3 using DD's 'power'. Maybe, I'll use autoconfigure to see what happens.
It appears that you did reply to my post. However, for a new user of any UNIX, including LINUX, setting up a system can prove very frustrating. I agree that us power-users should have access to the tools they are familiar with and know how to use. And, as I pointed out, there is. Boot your system using linux text. I think that you can get to fdisk as it is on CD 1. But I agree that new users could get confused coming from the Windows world on how UNIX fdisk works and could (in theory) end up seriously messing up their hard drive. DD gives them a graphical view of their drive. And I am going to look at the autoconfigure feature of DD. It may take some time to do this. I do have to sleep sometime....
On an unpartitioned disk it chooses where the partition goes. If there
are more than one disk it by default chooses both (or all) disks as the
possible targets. If you create say 5 partitons and you build them in
the order you want them placed IT chooses the order (and drive) it feels
is best for creating them. So what you thought was hda2 may actually
become hdb3, etc.
This may be desirable. However, it can and does become frustrating.
I did not reply to your post, James, I replied to Emmanuel's. And yes it is very frustrating to have things moved. I as yet see no benefit from having the tool decide what I want.
And I don't doubt that some folks have had problems with DD. I've seen problems that affect some folks and others are wondering what is happening. In this case, I feel that I am in the former group and yourself and others on the list are in the former. That is why I want to run an install on a clean disk rather than do an installation on a disk where I have to keep data from prior installs.
-- James McKenzie
