Can the partman udeb be excluded?

["Loving, Kent" <kent.loving@boeing.com>]

I have to create a debian installer CD that is for a specific hardware. I've chosen to use the LiveCD system and create a live CD that includes the debian-installer package. (I use a Live system because I must do some user interaction before launching the installer) I preseed everything, including partman for guided using largest unused space. I use sfdisk to partition the target exactly as required before launching into the debian-installer. The sfdisk script laid out the partitions I needed, plus left a large unused partition at the end.

This worked great for my first hardware target, which had a 30G drive. Sfdisk setup partitions 1-3, then I left partition 4 unused and partman correctly chose the free space at the end. Partman made the free space an extended partition, then created '/' and swap logical partions.

Then I tried this on hardware w/ an 140G drive. Because my required partitions changed, sfdisk creates physical partition 1, extended partition 2 (with multiple logicals), then leaves free space with partitions 3 and 4 unused. I expected partman to do what it will with the free space at the end. Instead in chose to ignore the partitions already set, and used up the entire disk for debian. 

I looked into the partman preseeding recipes for specifying partitions, but got lost. I cannot figure out how to specify a bunch of partitions that I want partman to leave alone.

So finally, my question. Why can't I just exclude the partman udeb and all the partman-* udebs? The target drive could be already partitioned and formatted, I'd just need a way to tell debian installer which partition to use for '/', swap, etc.