I kept getting an error while trying to install FC5 on a system with
an on-board ATA controller and a second ATA controller card plugged in.
I'd get through the screens for selecting packages and go to do the
actual format, and get a message to the effect of
hda4 cannot be updated. changes will not take effect until reboot.
Then I'd get the option to show the nice, helpful debug screen, but,
particularly considering the point in the install, no way to save
that long, arcane block of stack dump and whatnot (and I'm not going
to type it in by hand). The only option besides viewing the debug
dump is reboot, with the disk untouched.
With the partitions I was cutting, hda4 should not have been updated
anyway. Root went into hda1, I had the FC5 LVM volume in hda2, and I
was leaving the old FC3 file system (sans root) in hda3 (Extravagant,
I know, but I'm not into keeping movies on that 160G hard disk yet,
so it seems reasonable to just keep it around for a while.), and
leaving freeBSD in hda4 for the time being.
After some playing around, I left a little unused space at the end of
the LVM once and was able to proceed to the format and install (and
am proceeding with the updates now, man they sure take a while). I
was also able to do an install with one controller only (the one on
the motherboard).
I've been off-list for a while, so if this has come up before, I
apologize for the noise. I'm not sure what to look this up under on
bugzilla, since I don't remember the exact wording of the message.
