Red Hat Linux upgrade bug hides Windows

Red Hat's newest hobbyist and developer version of Linux, Fedora Core 2, caused trouble for some who found they couldn't start Windows after installing the Linux upgrade side by side with it.

The bug had cropped up in testing, but after Red Hat released Fedora Core 2 in May, many more users reported their systems no longer would boot Windows.

No data on the Windows side was destroyed, and some manual hard drive reconfiguration fixed the problem.

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"We do not think this is a severe problem," said Red Hat programmer Cristian Gafton in an e-mail interview, because information isn't destroyed, the problem is repairable, and "a very small fraction of systems are affected."

However, he added, "We recognize that it is an annoying issue for the users that are affected by it and we are working on publishing a fix that will address it."

Fedora Core is designed to satisfy the appetites of those who want the latest software while maturing Linux improvements more quickly for use in the corporate product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The company makes no pretenses of Fedora's stability; the Web site includes the disclaimer, "The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat."

Until 2002, Red Hat offered an identical version of Linux as a free, unsupported download or as a paid product with support. Now only Fedora Core 2 is available for free, while Enterprise Linux, which changes more slowly, costs between $349 and $18,000 per one-year support subscription.

The problem with Fedora Core 2 apparently had to do with changes made to a computer's description of the physical layout of its hard disk, data called the partition table, Gafton said.

In some cases, Fedora Core 2 would use a different convention to record the information, and Windows XP wouldn't recognize the disk. In other cases, the problem stemmed differences in how Windows, Linux and a computer's BIOS--basic input-output software used in the early stages of starting a computer--handle the partition table information, Gafton said.

This affects all 2.6 kernel distributions

This is not a problem just with Fedora. Because of the popularity (and high expectations) of this distribution, it has been the mst visible, but Mandrake, SUSE and others are also affected. The 2.6 kernel is arguably doing the right thing whereas Windows (as usual) is arguably slightly broken. In any case, it's been a hot topic for weeks, and has been well discussed at Slashdot and many other sites.

Like the Fedora people said, it doesn't seem to be a serious flaw, although it could bite someone who wasn't technical and wasn't alerted to the possibility.

[kraterz]

Not just the 2.6 kernel, a combination of factors.

It is a combination of problems, partly due to the new way the 2.6 kernel reports disk geometry, and the way GRUB works, and the BIOS settings for the HDD (auto vs LBA).

Looks like the fedora chaps hadn't done enough testing. After numerous problems after RH9.0, I stopped using redhat / fedora, but have been working successfully with Debian and slackware, including debian's unstable and testing distros. I've installed the 2.6 kernel and upgraded GRUB on many different machines (Linux+2K/XP) and have never once come up with this dual boot problem.

This is not the only problem with fedora / redhat. When I tried getting some of my office mates (who are new to linux) to try it, so many things were broken, including some admin interfaces from GNOME, and lots of other stuff. Frankly, fedora is not useable in a production environment, even after being in testing for so many months, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, not even testers.

We switched them to Mandrake (and Debian for the techies) and they are very happy... the systems are very stable and work as advertised.

Information is old

The community has known about this for the last month or so. OSNews and Slashdot had this available 3 weeks to a month before this was posted. Post this when it's new; not when it's been out for a month.

[beckerbp]

This story should never have been published

It is a non-issue. A beta/test release that breaks Microsoft Windows dual-boot funtionality is of interest only to the testers and the developers. Any tester that experiments with a beta OS knows to expect bugs and possibly havoc, and would never expose real production systems and data to risk, so it should not be reported in this way. If this had been a final release of red Hat Linux and it performed this way, that would be news. This is not.