On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 3:55 PM stan <upaitag(a)zoho.com> wrote:
It seems that the above won't be necessary, as I must have
originally
formatted the drive as GPT, and forgotten I'd done so.
I was able to switch the firmware to strictly BIOS from UEFI/BIOS
hybrid, with UEFI preferred. That allowed the installer to proceed.
Unfortunately, it hung while trying to write an mbr, though everything
else worked; it installed software, I was able to set users and
passwords. I suspect that is because the disk I was installing to is
actually formatted with GPT, since it is larger than 2 TiB.
The installer will not convert GPT disk to MBR disk, or MBR to GPT. It
also won't write an MBR to a 2+TiB drive.
It ran for
over 20 minutes at almost 100% CPU and didn't complete. So, I killed
it. But it had somehow altered something so that when I tried to boot
to the other Fedora installed on that disk, it immediately dropped to a
grub prompt. It was trying to validate partitions with os-prober at the
time I killed it, according to the log, and had hung on the existing
Fedora root partition. When I booted in rescue and looked at the disk
with fdisk, it declared that all the other partitions on the disk
except the ones I had tried to install to were Microsoft data format.
That gave me a scare, until I noticed that there was no logical
partition. Fortunately I had an older Fedora on another disk that is
actually BIOS, and when I booted that from the firmware, I was able to
boot and run it. I then ran a mkconfig there, and the os-prober found
the original Fedora on the other disk, and created boot stanzas for
it. So I was able to get back to my Fedora, the version I am writing
this from, in a roundabout way.
The installation failure needs a bug report with all the installer
logs attached, and a description of reproduce steps, and the before
and after state.
The issue seems to be that hybrid installs are not allowed. If I
install as BIOS, then I have to use BIOS partitioning, not gpt.
Not correct. The installer does support GPT when booted with BIOS
firmware. It just doesn't support MBR with UEFI firmware.
And, if
I install as UEFI, for some reason it doesn't accept the existing ext4
partitions on the gpt formatted drive.
That's a separate bug report, also needs installer logs attached.
Is must be possible to boot a
GPT drive from a BIOS mbr because it appears that I was doing that.
I can't parse this.
Or, did the hybrid UEFI/BIOS firmware setting allow both?
Running 'efibootmgr' will tell you what firmware is being presented to
the kernel.
Here's the partition table for the disk from gdisk -l.
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2097152 4194303 1024.0 MiB 8300
2 4194304 6291455 1024.0 MiB 0700
3 6291456 48234495 20.0 GiB 8200
4 48234496 572522495 250.0 GiB 8300
5 572522496 1096810495 250.0 GiB 0700
6 1096810496 5860532223 2.2 TiB 0700
7 2048 6143 2.0 MiB EF02
The first two partitions are boot, then swap, then two root partitions,
then data. The code for the partitions I was trying to install from
the iso to are now 8300, the existing Fedora is 0700.
That's all suspicious because 0700 for a boot volume isn't correct,
and suggests an old version of parted created that partition. Also
partition 3 cannot be a root partition, the type code is for swap.
Can I actually somehow do a UEFI install to this disk, preserving
the
existing Fedora and being able to boot to it directly?
Dual Fedora's isn't officially supported. The installer almost always
steps on the previous Fedora's bootloader making it unbootable, in
favor of a new bootloader for the new Fedora installation. Sometimes
grub2-mkconfig finds the old Fedora and will add entries for it in the
grub.cfg, sometimes not. If root is a plain partition, it'll be
discovered probably, and if it's LVM, the installer doesn't activate
LVM for other installations so os-prober won't see them and won't
create menu entries.
So you'll have to jerry-rig it yourself after the new installation.
--
Chris Murphy