SuSE GmbH

SuSE Support Database

Title: YaST dies before partitioning

----------

Mainpage o Searchform o History o Versions o Categories o Contents
Deutsch

----------

YaST dies before partitioning

Applies to

SuSE Linux: Version 5.3 International, 1st Edition
YaST: Version 0.97.3

Symptom

You want to install S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3. The installation aborts before you can partition your hard disk. There seems to be no way to get around that point.

Further conditions:

The described problem may perhaps also occur if you want to integrate an additional disk in your system.

Cause

There's a bug in YaST's language management which causes YaST to crash whenever a certain dialog is called which informs the user about free disk space. After the crash the system returns to Linuxrc.

Solution

There are two possible workarounds :
  1. Under another operating system (e.g. DOS, Windows, OS/2, etc)
  2. Under Linux

Under another operating system

Please partition the remaining disk space by creating a partition which covers the rest of the disk. There must be no space left which is not covered by any partition.

The partitioning can be done with the OS's fdisk or third party tools like Partition Magic or System Commander.

Under Linux

Just start the installation as usual (as described in the manual). Now you should be able to partition your hard disk using YaST. The first thing you should do when partitioning is to remove the above created partition. :-)

On our ftp server there's an update package for YaST which does not contain the bug anymore. You won't be able to use this package at installation time, but in the running system, a fixed YaST is not too bad, is it? ;-) You will find the package under ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse_update/suse53/a1/yast.rpm.


There may be some hard cases where it might be necessary to erase the partition table of the disk entirely. This can be done using a DOS tools or Linux.

In order to do it with Linux just start as described above, but instead of calling fdisk enter the following:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=100
This erases the first 100 blocks of 1024 byte on the first SCSI disk.

Please replace /dev/sda by the name of your disk's device file.

Important!

The solution described in the last step above erases the partition table of your disk in an unrecoverable way. All data on this disk will be lost!

Please enter the name of your hard disk carefully!

Create a backup of important data before performing the step above !

----------

See also:

----------

Keywords: YAST, FDISK, PARTITIONING, INSTALLATION, HARDDISK

----------

Categories: Administration

----------

Mainpage o Searchform o History o Versions o Categories o Contents
Deutsch

----------

SDB-maddin_yast_fdisk, Copyright SuSE GmbH, Nuremberg, Germany - Version: 10. Sep 1998
SuSE GmbH - Last generated: 07. Oct 1999 17:23:01 by maddin with sdb_gen 1.00.0