Bug#236973: Successful but troubled installation on mips (Indy R4k)

[nbreen@ofb.net (Nicholas Breen)]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 06:01:29PM +0200, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> On  8.III.2004 22:38 at Nicholas Breen wrote:
> > The partitioning tool proved troublesome.
> >  - Default partition table selection should be 'dvh'.
> 
> I think in partman it is 'dvh'.

At least as of version 17 (most recent on my mirror of choice), it
defaults to the top of the list, 'bsd'.

> Is it possible to use parted to create partition table on SGI?  If
> yes, then it must be possible to use partman.  Otherwise partman
> should not be used on SGI.

Not readily so.  There are two problems: first, although parted can
create a dvh volume label, it incorrectly creates the volhdr as
partition 1.  The SGI's PROM assumes that it will be booting from
partition 9.  There is a painfully inefficent but scriptable workaround
documented here:

  http://www.total-knowledge.com/progs/mips/SGI-BootCD-HOWTO.shtml

(Summary of the link: Create 8 dummy partitions plus the 9th volhdr
partition, delete the dummy partitions, and resize 9 into place.)

The second problem is the incorrect assignment of filesystem type.
parted only creates new partitions as type 0x03 (SGI raw) rather than
0x82 or 0x83, and I haven't found any way other than fdisk to correct
that.


-- 
Nicholas Breen
nbreen@ofb.net