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Re: Installer manual, paragraph difficult to understand



On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 05:03:29PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Thursday 17 August 2006 16:43, Tapio Lehtonen wrote:
> > Unless you wish to use the disk you are partitioning from Tru64 Unix
> > or one of the free 4.4BSD-Lite derived operating systems (FreeBSD,
> > OpenBSD, or NetBSD), it is suggested that you do
> > <emphasis>not</emphasis> make the third partition contain the whole
> > disk. This is not required by <command>aboot</command>, and in fact,
> > it may lead to confusion since the <command>swriteboot</command>
> > utility used to install <command>aboot</command> in the boot sector
> > will complain about a partition overlapping with the boot block.

> > Does it mean:

> > 1) If the disk previously contained Tru64 Unix or one of the free
> > 4.4BSD-Lite ..., the third partition should not contain the whole disk
> > if you want to use the disk for GNU/Linux only.

> Almost certainly this one.

> Perhaps this makes it clearer: "..., it is not necessary to create the 
> third partition as a "whole disk" partition (i.e. with start and end 
> sectors to span the whole disk). In fact ..."

> Should I commit this for the original English version?

No, this goes beyond "it is not necessary", this is a "you should not".
Unless you wish to use the disk with one of these operating systems, your
third partition should *not* be configured as a "whole disk" partition, as
this renders the disk incompatible with the tools used to make disks
bootable with aboot.  This means that the disk configured by the installer
for use as the Debian boot disk will be inaccessible to $those_OSes.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/

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