Re: Repartitioning/Reinstalling
On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 08:12:59AM -0400, Rich Johnson wrote:
> >
> > In any case, I am done with my rants. If you want to repartition without
> > reinstalling post a message here. By the way, don't ever forget the
> > backups, and experiment with doing a selective restore, if not a full
> > one, before you embark on making major changes to your system.
> >
> > Good luck!
>
> Well, there are a couple of things here. Of course they're all over the map.
> 1. I didn't say I _wanted_ to re-install, although I did say I was _planning_
> to reinstall. And yes, I have gone a long way playing games with fdisk, fstab
> and tar.
I never did like fdisk, try gnu/parted, it has about the same, perhaps
more, features as partition magic. You can resize and move exiting ext2
partitions and a whole lot more.
> 2. This machine is dual-boot "Old World" Mac. The time is approaching when I'm
> going to punt the Mac partitions. I'm not ready to bite that bullet just yet,
> but I'd like to be prepared. This machine has a lot of cruft on it. Mac OS7
> through 9.x; LinuxPPC at one time, and now Debian. I have the feeling it would
> be easier to re-install than to tease out the cruft.
Or, perhaps, reformat the partitions that you want to get rid of, and
merge them into existing partitions or create new ones out of them.
You could probably even do a reinstall of the Mac OSes without touching
your Debian installation - I am not a Mac user, but I have done
reinstalls of win98/2k and FreeBSD. It's not that difficult once you
figure out how each OS views the disk partitions.
> 3. Disaster recovery is not always "fix and restore backup". Over the years
> I've seen it result in:
> replacing disks - which usually have a different size.
Hard to imagine how you could entirely corrupt your hard drive just
trying to repartition it.
> replaceing memory - with the opportunity to add more and resize swap.
Not sure what you mean by your reference to "swap", but you can
resize or move swap on a Debian system without doing a reinstall.
> replacing the entire machine - which may involve an architecture change.
> 4. fdisk and its ilk make me nervous. I do not like using them without being
> prepared to re-install everything.
But, of course! I agree. When I did housecleaning on my system I was
certainly reconciled to reinstalling from scratch. I just saw the
opportunity to avoid a reinstallation as a bonus, and achieving it
gave me great satisfaction.
> 5. Replication - Some of my clients require a roll-out plan--or how to generate
> a viable server from raw hardware. It's probably another thread but, Debian has
> a compelling story:
> a. almost rock solid - certainly more solid than any public M$ offerings.
> b. runs on any hardware - no need to manage/locate vendor specific drivers
> and disks.
> c. "standard" set of boot disks for a particular architecture.
> d. add packages - but I'm a bit fuzzy on how to specify and automate thi
> step.
> e. painless upgrade path.
>
>
> --rich
This should be a separate thread. If you are implying that you want to
do a reinstall so as to familiarize yourself with setting up a Debian
system on virgin hardware, then, by all means, take that path.
-Andy
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