On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Monday 24 January 2005 21:55, Jeff Vian wrote:However, that still does not justify making it more difficult for those who _do_ have a clue.
And thats my point precisely. The current way around in DD means it still has a final say-so, because you cannot proceed without its apparent writes to the bootblocks. If I have setup what I want in fdisk, then there needs to be some method thats obvious, for one to get out of DD without its touching the drive, and let anaconda proceed to format what it can see by doing its own read of the bootblocks for the partition table AS IT EXISTS at that point in time. At that point, if it appears that a mke2fs has already been done at some point, either now or maybe 5 years ago, anaconda needs to ask if the data on this partition is to be wiped. Even Joe Sixpack ought to be able to grab a pencil and paper and keep track of that. Particularly if he was prompted to do so by anaconda "just for future record keeping" if nothing else.
But if you set the partitions in fdisk, select "partition manually" and don't make any changes to the partition layout, DD doesn't do anything to the partition table.
The reason you can't escape going through DD in this case is that DD is where you associate partitions with filesystems. fdisk can't do that, because fdisk knows nothing about filesystems or labels (except for the type code). So what you need to do is:
(1) Lay your disk out with fdisk. (Use Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get to it from the screen where you select auto or manual partition.)
(2) Go to DD by choosing manual partition. Edit each partition. In the edit window, associate the partition with the appropriate filesystem. If the partition already contains a recognizable system, the edit window tells you its label. For the installation partitions, select "format".
(3) Proceed to the next screen. As you haven't changed the partition layout, DD will not secretly change the partition layout either. It will format filesystems that you specify, and it will warn you if you fail to specify that a partition it needs should be formatted. I think it will warn you if you fail to create a partition it needs (e.g., swap). I don't know what it does if you attempt to use a logical partition for /boot.
It might be handy for some users if DD read the labels on existing filesystems and proposed an association, but then again, for other users, it might not.
-- Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
