Re: Disk partition on a Sparc 5
On 2 Oct 2001, Thomas Duffy wrote:
> On Tue, 2001-10-02 at 19:22, David Demland wrote:
> > I am trying to install Debian on a Sparc 5. I get to the point of partition
> > the disk, question: What units should I use and what are the sizes? When I
> > configure them they way I think they should be I can not install the tar
> > balls there is an error. I am sure it is disk space.
>
> make sure you have a sun partition table. make sure partition 3 is a
> "Whole Disk". and that swap is not on partition 1. other than that,
> you can configure any sizes you desire.
Why shouldn't the swap be in partition 1? That's where Sun's format
program defaults to placing the swap partition. With a Solaris or NetBSD
installation, I always set it up this way:
0 - / [ie. root] (min 128 MB of space to allow for crash-dumps, etc.)
1 - swap
2 - whole disk mirror
3 - /var
6 - /usr
and the others are used depending what the machine is going to do.
Generally 4 becomes where I still all the X-windows data (/usr/openwin
with Solaris), 5 is where all my application source goes, and 7 will be
/home on any machine which has other users.
The question is how does this translate to what Debian expects? Why can't
'fdisk' supplied with Debian set up the disk the same way as Sun's format
program with a SunOS-compatible disk label, etc.? If it already can do
that, I didn't get anything out of the install instructions that suggested
it's possible.
I was tearing my hair out the first time I installed Debian recently
trying to work out how to get the partition table set up, and I worked out
by trial and error that I needed to boot off a Solaris CD in single-user
mode to set up the disk label before tryuing to install Debian. That was
before the disk died and now I'm doing it all again from scratch with a
new drive later today.
> if you let fdisk auto partition the disk, it should stick / on part1,
> swap on part2 and make part3 a "Whole Disk"
Can 'fdisk' do this with a disk that does not have any SunOS disk label
already written onto it? I'm going to get into re-installing Potato onto
the new disk tonight... BTW, I had problems working out what Debian called
the CD-ROM device so the CD install I did the first time around was rather
botched and I ended up pulling off the core stuff only and getting
everything else from a Debian FTP site.
The instructions for doing all this are very confusing for first-time
Linux users like me (I'm used to Solaris but not Linux), btw.
Regards,
Craig.
--
Craig Ian Dewick (craig@lios.apana.org.au). http://lios.apana.org.au/~craig
Operator of Jedi (APANA Sydney member-access site) in Waterfall, Australia.
Always striving for a secure long-term future in an insecure short-term world
Have you exported a crypto system today? Do your bit to undermine the NSA.
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