Interesting problems on a linux+xfs system.

[Nathan J. Mehl]

I'm having an interesting/frustrating problem with Parted 1.4.16 on an
SGI XFS 1.0.1 Linux system (based on RedHat 7.1) that is preventing me
from doing a system upgrade.

A "parted /dev/hda print" using parted 1.4.16 shows:

        Disk geometry for /tmp/hda: 0.000-73308.867 megabytes
        Disk label type: msdos
        Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
        1          0.031     54.909  primary   xfs         boot
        2         54.910  73304.406  extended              
        5         54.940  59420.104  logical   linux-swap  
        6      59420.136  59937.824  logical   linux-swap  

The problem with this is that hda5 is _not_ a linux-swap filesystem,
it's an XFS filesystem.  Fdisk agrees with this assessment:

        Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9345 cylinders
        Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
        
           Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
        /dev/hda1   *         1         7     56196   83  Linux
        /dev/hda2             8      9345  75007485    5  Extended
        /dev/hda5             8      7575  60789928+  83  Linux
        /dev/hda6          7576      7641    530113+  82  Linux swap

        Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9345 cylinders
        Nr AF  Hd Sec  Cyl  Hd Sec  Cyl    Start     Size ID
         1 80   1   1    0 254  63    6       63   112392 83
         2 00   0   1    7 254  63 1023   112455150014970 05
         3 00   0   0    0   0   0    0        0        0 00
         4 00   0   0    0   0   0    0        0        0 00
         5 00   1   1    7 254  63 1023       63121579857 83
         6 00   1   1 1023 254  63 1023       63  1060227 82

xfs_repair returns clean on /dev/hda5, but parted persists in
identifying the partition as swap.

At this point, I'm somewhat stymied.  As long as parted believes that
hda5 is a swap partition, redhat's anaconda installer will refuse to
install onto it, which is suboptimal since that's my root partition.
Neither fdisk nor any of the xfs userland tools seem similarly
confused about the fs type, and parted doesn't seem to have an option
to change the type of a partition without rebuilding it.

A strace of parted running on /dev/hda can be found at
http://blank.org/memory/parted_strace.txt, should this be at all
helpful to anyone.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

-n

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