Brian, On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 10:11:13PM -0400, Brian S. Julin wrote: > Root Size/partition table: sdb(2G)=/ sda(1G)=aboot,/boot,swap,other Since this bug report was about partitioning problems, it would have been good to have the actual output of fdisk here. > First time through: > Booted, tried to change debconf priority but no menu option for it. > Went in to configure anna source > Downloaded and installed default module components > Now debconf priority available so selected low > Went in to configure anna source, selected "unstable" > Went back into install module components to get kernel modules > Shelled out and did some data backups of old drive using nc > Played around a bit with stuff, including loading "search for isos", > which was able to recognize filesystems just fine. > Started parted. Here is where the problems began. > Two drives in the machine. sdb was old system drive, one partition > was second half of a failed raid1, probably disklabel partitioned. > sda had one small parition, not disklabel, done under i386 with ext2, > and the rest free space. Filesystem detection failed, partitions > showed no filesystem type even the ext2 on sda. > Deleted partitions on sdb, created one large primary as / > Redefinined 32M ext2 partition on sda as /boot. > Added other partitions to sda. > During finish, got aboot warning. > Went back in to try to change 32M partition to aboot > Installer would no longer offer aboot as an option, even when > creating a new partition with /boot already defined on that disk. > Backed out of installer and reentered. > aboot option reappeared. Went to finish, but at this point /boot > was not a separate partition and was thus on sdb, so got a different > warning > Went back into partitioner to get things right (/boot and aboot on > same disk). > Could not get aboot option again. > (my recollection gets a little fuzzier here) > Eventually got things looking right, but got warning about no disklabel > Started getting messages about VM killing process choice > Often by this point could not get ext2 option > Before I could get a shell open to check ps, all new processes were dying You seem to have tried quite a few things here, making it difficult for me to take in all at once. In reference to not being able to get the aboot option, though, this should always be an option for the *first* partition on the disk and not for any others. The aboot partition *must* be at the beginning of the disk, because this is where SRM will look for the bootloader; while aboot will never access this as a partition, the space must be reserved so that nothing else tries to write to it. I have no explanation for the VM errors you received; I don't believe this is related to the partitioning question. > Second run: > > Escaped out after language selection. > This time instead of trying choose mirror, went directly to install components > -- was presented with the choice of distro, despite not having done anything > with debconf priority. Chose unstable. > Install proceeded normally. > This time, partition filesystems were detected and showed in parted > Couldn't find any options to create disklabel, and no fdisk > Eventually figured out that deleting all partitions on sda would > create disklabel if aboot added first as top partition -- a rather > obfuscated and undocumented way to do things IMO I'm not certain, but I think that using one of the autopartitioning recipes would also create a new disklabel for you. I believe that fdisk should be present from the shell (last option on the menu, or console 2). I'm not sure if partman should be trusted to rewrite a DOS partition table to a BSD disklabel on a disk that has active partitions, or if users should be given a button to do this :), but that seems to be the only other way to address your concern here. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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