Bug#273343: About you failed installation attempt on SPARC64

[Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>]

Hi!

Thanks about your installation report.  You sent it on 25 Sep 2004:

http://bugs.debian.org/273343

You wrote:

> I have two SCSI hard drives of 2.2GB each.  The plan was as follows:
> sda1  50MB /boot
> sda2 200MB swap
> sda4 1.9GB RAID0 storage \
> sdb1 250MB swap           > / (root)
> sdb2 1.9GB RAID0 storage /

The problem was that you put swap space (sdb1) at the beginning of the
disk.  This is not allowed on sun disk labels because if the first
partition start at the beginning of the disk then the partition table is
part of the first partition.  This is OK if the first partition contains
some file system but it is not allowed if the first partition is swap or
phisical volume for LVM or RAID.

> I selected "Configure Software Raid", it wrote the partition layout to
> disk, created filesystems etc.  Then it complained that there were no
> partition for RAID available, so I went back to the partitioning menu.
> Now my layout looked like this:
>
> sda1  51.0MB /boot
> sda2 199.9MB swap
> sda4   1.9GB physical volume (LVM)
> sdb1   2.2GB swap
>
> Where did my second physical volume go???

Because the partition table was part of sdb1 it was erased when the
partitioner formatted the swap space.

We definitely need a warning message if the user tries to put swap, LVM
or RAID at the beginning of the disk.  Thanks again for you report.

Anton Zinoviev