On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 06:56:40AM -0400, Toni L. Harbaugh-Blackford [Contr] wrote: > On Wed, 4 May 2005, Steve Langasek wrote: > > d-i does use swriteboot to install aboot to the disk. That's not the issue. > > The issue is the same that it's always been: Tru64 doesn't cope with > > disklabels that don't include a full-disk slice, and the debian-installer > > can't reasonably create such a slice for us (for various and sundry reasons > > that have been discussed on this list before). > Sorry to beat a dead horse, but I am trying to understand > the installer's operation in the context of a PRE-existing > Tru64 label, where the full-disk slice already exists > and thus does not have to be created by the installer. d-i won't be able to recognize a pre-existing Tru64 label as a valid partition table, because it can't cope with overlapping partitions. If you install to such a disk, d-i will initialize a new disklabel. > Are you saying that the installer modifies the pre-existing > label so that no partitions cover block 0, which would in turn > allow swriteboot to be called without '-f'? Rather, it modifies the label so that no partitions overlap one another. swriteboot still has to be called with '-f', because we have to create a dummy aboot partition at the front of the disk in order to reserve the space. Creating a full-disk slice, aside from burning through the number of available partitions more quickly, means swriteboot won't work at all because it only lets you ignore overlaps with a *single* partition. I'd love to not have to create a dummy partition for aboot so that we can create a full-disk slice instead for Tru64 compatibility, but this isn't going to happen for sarge. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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