Re: Booting Debian/testing fails

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:50:27AM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:03:02AM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 12:57:09AM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote:
> > > On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 08:40:02PM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > > > > > wouldn't consider a *N*X are doing so.  And they're not prepared.  
> > > > > 
> > > > > so in other words... its a good thing! 
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Yes.  It tells us that our documentation isn't up to their needs.
> > > > 
> > > > Doug.
> > > Well, I'd say that the value of 'their' has progressively been changing
> > > to be an ever more less expeirenced group of users.
> > 
> > Well, I've been using Linux for five years -- at least -- I've lost 
> > count -- with various distros (starting frome when slackware was just 
> > starting to be installed from CDROM instead of floppies), have settled 
> > on Debian, and are tempted by Gentoo.  I don't find the documentation up 
> > to *my* needs.  Or else maybe I stil don't know where to find it.
> > 
> > For example, where do you find details on why rescue mode, swapped hard 
> > drives (/dev/hda <-> /dev/hdc) when I asked it to start a shell in the 
> > context of my root partition but not when I asked it to start a shell in 
> > the installer context?  In fact running fdisk /dev/hda in the root 
> > context showed me a perfect partition table for /dev/hdc, except that 
> > all the partitions were labelled as being on /dev/hda.
> > 
> > Now I know the boot-loaders have provisions for swapping hard-drive 
> > letters.  But why were they invoked?
> > 
> > This is the kind of detail that needs to be documented.  And access to 
> > wource code is no longer a solution, even for experienced programmers -- 
> > there's just too much undocumented context for each piece of the 
> > hundred-million-odd lines of code that constitute Debian that that's 
> > only practical for specialists in the particular subsystem under 
> > investigation.
> > 
> > I've considered switching to Gentoo, because some of their advocates say 
> > their distribution is strong on documentation, but I suspect that they 
> > mey not be a lot better.
> 
> Do you need to know the _why_ of that, or would you have liked a
> heads-up and what to do about it?

I needed to know what to do about it.  Not knowing the why, I decided I 
couldn't trust the rescue system and improvised a workaround that 
involved installing a new Debian system on a spare partition on 
/dev/hda2 (fortunately I still had some space) and using *its* lilo to 
establish bootability of /dev/hdc3.

> The _why_ may be a complicated technical answer usable only to those
> working on coding the installer (or the kernel).  The
> what-to-do-about-it should be simple for someone who has dealt with it
> to explain.

I know that Debian has ways of futzing the BIOS so that drive letters 
are different from the standard ones.  What I don't know is why it 
decided to do this as a rescue attempt.  My lack of understanding made 
the rescue system untrustable, hence unusable.  And I'm not at all sure 
that posting the details on, say, debian-user would have resulted in an 
answer sufficiently authoritative to be trustworthy.

-- hendrik