Re: qtparted and kernel disagree about partitions
On Fri, 5 Mar 2010 10:28:29 -0500 (EST), David Goodenough wrote:
> Actually the problem is (as I have pointed out in the bug report) worse
> that this, because while the kernel has been updated to take note of
> the HPA, the tools such as *parted have not. So if your disk has an HPA
> and you try to partition it using *parted, presumably you will get what
> looks like a hardware error, and it will make no sense as the sizes
> reported by *parted are the physical ones, not the HPA reduced ones.
That's not the only area in which parted lags behind. On the s390
platform, parted does not recognize CMS-formatted disks, but the
kernel does. (In fact, on FBA DASD, CMS-formatted disks are the *only*
format the kernel supports.) The result is that an entire class of DASD
devices (all FBA DASD devices) are effectively unsupported by the
Debian installer, and CKD devices which are in CMS format are also
unsupported. I had to come up with a rather elaborate procedure to
get Debian installed on CMS-formatted disks
(see http://www.wowway.com/~zlinuxman/diag250.htm if you're interested.)
I think the Debian installer itself would probably work if parted
recognized the CMS disk format. It wouldn't need to have read/write
capabilities (create partition, delete partition, resize partition, etc.).
All it needs to be able to do is to recognize the partition and
report its size correctly. I think the Debian installer could probably
handle things from there.
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