I have a dual boot XP + FC3 I am upgrading to FC8. Problem is I don't
remember all those partition mysteries, and I don't want to stomp my XP
install. I don't care if I preserve any of my FC3 files, I just thought
an upgrade might be safer than a fresh install.
When I started to 'upgrade', I got a warning about /dev/hda6 not being
mountable and how I might have problems if I continued, so I quit. The
FC8 installer docs mention there may be (new) problems with unlabeled
partitions, and it does appear that several are not labeled:
/dev/hda1, label=none, type ntfs, ID 7,
cyl: 0 7564
/dev/hda2, label="/boot", type linux, ID 83, cyl: 7565
7575
/dev/hda3, label="/", type linux, ID 83, cyl:
7576 10094
/dev/hda4, label=none, type W95 ext'd LBA, ID f, cyl:10095 10337
/dev/hda5, label=none, type linux swap, ID 82, cyl:10095 10229
/dev/hda6, label=none, typeW95 FAT32 LBA, ID c, cyl:10230 10336
I know that the 1st partition is XP drive C, the next two are linux
/boot and /. The 4th partition is of extended type, which I believe is
split into the 5th and 6th partition. The 5th partition is linux swap,
and I think the 6th partition was just the odd bytes left over after
splitting everything up, and even though it shows up in XP as drive F it
isn't really used.
I added volume labels in XP for partition 1 & 6, but it when I booted in
FC3, it didn't make any difference as far as what $blkid and fdisk
report. I guess volume labels are not the same as partition labels.
If I instead go down the path of a fresh install with FC8 and choose to
make custom partition assignments, the installer shows me a table of
what it thinks I have - very similar to what I get with $fdisk /dev/hda
except the "start" and "end" numbers (cylinders?) are not the same.
For instance instead of
/dev/hda1 start 0 end 7564 as I posted above, the FC8 installer says
/dev/sda1 start 1 end 7120. The other partition numbers differ as well.
Without knowing more about these numbers, it looks like the installer is
going to mess up my XP partition simply because it has the math wrong on
partition size. The installer shows the partition label fields but does
not let me edit them.
So really three questions:
How would I add partition labels if I really needed to?
Do I really need to?
Why doesn't the installer report the same sizes as fdisk?
