Chris Tyler - Fedora Linux

Like most of the Fedora system administration tools, Disk Druid (and Anaconda) are largely written in Python and interface with other open source tools such as parted , libparted , and lvm .

The purpose of Disk Druid is to improve the installation experience by taking care of many of the partitioning, RAID configuration, and LVM setup details automatically.

While other partitioning tools such as fdisk and parted require the user to keep track of partition numbers and starting and ending locations, and to use cylinders as a unit of measure, Disk Druid handles partition numbering automatically (even including drive selection, where appropriate).

On a PC, the first sector of each disk drive stores a Master Boot Record (MBR). The last 64 bytes of the MBR contain a partition table , which can hold a maximum of four entries; each entry contains a starting and ending cylinder number, boot flag, and partition type code. If more than four partitions are required, one of the MBR entries is configured to point to an extended partition , which contains its own extended partition table . The extended partition table can contain a maximum of one partition entry and one additional extended partition entry, both of which must be located within the extended partition. In this way, any number of partitions may be created.

There are many different types of disklabels , or disk partition table types, used on different types of systems. Of particular note for Fedora users is the fact that Mac systems use a different, more capable disk partition table. parted is able to display, create, and manipulate nine different types of disklabels, including those for IBM AIX Unix systems, Macs, PCs (called msdos in the parted documentation), Sun systems, and many others.

 The manpages for parted , fdisk , lvm , and mdadm

 The Anaconda project page: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/anaconda-installer/

 The Anaconda Wiki page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda

The Fedora Core installation process is usually booted from CD or DVD, but it may also be booted from a USB flash disk or hard disk drive, or from a PXE boot server.

In addition, Fedora Core permits the use of an FTP or HTTP server as the package source during installation.

These alternate installation media must be specially prepared before use.

Before preparing alternate boot media, check that the target system can boot from the media you wish to use. Examine the BIOS of the system on which Fedora will be installed to see if it supports booting from a USB flash drive or a PXE server; if not, select a different installation medium.

To configure a USB drive for booting, download the USB boot image by selecting a mirror site from the web page http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html and going to that mirror with a web browser. Select the directory for the desired Fedora Core version number (e.g., 6 ), then the directory for your machine architecture ( i386 , PPC , or x86_64 ), then select the os directory, and then select the images subdirectory. Download the file named diskboot.img (you can also find this in the /images directory of the Fedora Core DVD or the first disc of the CD set).

The directory layout varies slightly among the mirror sites.

Once you have obtained the diskboot.img file, transfer it to your USB flash drive using a Linux system. First, insert the drive into the system; you should see an icon appear on the desktop.

This procedure will wipe out everything on your USB flash drive! Back up the drive contents before proceeding.

Use the df command to determine the drive's device name:

$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/main-root 30G 14G 15G 48% /

/dev/md0 251M 41M 197M 18% /boot

/dev/shm 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm

/dev/mapper/main-home 14G 6.6G 7.0G 49% /home

/dev/mapper/main-var 65G 56G 8.0G 88% /var

/dev/hdb1 99M 24M 71M 26% /mnt/oldboot

/dev/hdb3 109G 75G 29G 73% /mnt/oldroot

/dev/hda6 14G 4.1G 8.5G 33% /mnt/x-root

/dev/sdb1 8.0M 6.4M 1.7M 80% /media/usbdisk1

In this case, the device name is /dev/sdb1 . Unmount that device:

# umount /dev/sdb1

(Notice that there is only one n in umount .)

Now copy the boot image to the USB flash drive:

# dd if=diskboot.img of= /dev/sdb1

16384+0 records in

16384+0 records out

Flush the system disk buffers to ensure that the data is written out to the drive before you unplug it:

# sync

The USB flash drive is now ready for booting. Insert the drive into the target system, turn it on, and use the BIOS options to specify that the system is to be booted from the USB drive; the rest of the process will be identical to booting from a CD or DVD.

When you're done using the drive to install Fedora Core, you'll find that it looks like an 8 MB drive, regardless of its actual drive capacity. To restore its full capacity, format it with a FAT32 filesystem:

# mkdosfs /dev/sdb1

mkdosfs 2.10 (22 Sep 2003)

You can use any FTP, HTTP, or NIS server for network installation, but of these three, HTTP is the easiest to set up and has the least overhead.

You'll need the full set of installation files. You can copy the entire contents of the DVD (or each of the five CDs) to a directory shared by your web server:

# mkdir /var/www/fedora

# cp -R /media/discname /var/www/fedora

Replace /media/diskname with the disc mount point (see the output of df ).

Instead of copying the files, you could leave the DVD in your drive (this won't work with CDs, since you need several of them) and create a symbolic link from your web server's document root to the DVD mount point:

# ln -s /media/ disk /var/www/html/fedora

Since the DVD's filesystem does not support file attributesnecessary to assign an SELinux contextyou will have to disable SELinux enforcement for HTTPD before using it to serve files from a DVD.

Alternatively, you can download the files directory to your web server directory. Go to the web page http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html , select an rsync , HTTP, or FTP mirror site for download, and download the entire distribution (all of the files and subdirectories in the os directory for your platform).

The directory layout varies from mirror to mirror. Use a browser to connect to your selected mirror site to confirm the directory names for the following commands.

On an existing Fedora Core system, you can do this by first creating a directory that is web-accessible: