Re: Booting Debian/testing fails
On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 05:44:40PM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:50:27AM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:03:02AM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> > > On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 12:57:09AM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote:
> >
> > > For example, where do you find details on why rescue mode, swapped hard
> > > drives (/dev/hda <-> /dev/hdc) when I asked it to start a shell in the
> > > context of my root partition but not when I asked it to start a shell in
> > > the installer context? In fact running fdisk /dev/hda in the root
> > > context showed me a perfect partition table for /dev/hdc, except that
> > > all the partitions were labelled as being on /dev/hda.
> > >
> > > Now I know the boot-loaders have provisions for swapping hard-drive
> > > letters. But why were they invoked?
> > >
> > > This is the kind of detail that needs to be documented. And access to
> > > wource code is no longer a solution, even for experienced programmers --
> > > there's just too much undocumented context for each piece of the
> > > hundred-million-odd lines of code that constitute Debian that that's
> > > only practical for specialists in the particular subsystem under
> > > investigation.
> >
> > Do you need to know the _why_ of that, or would you have liked a
> > heads-up and what to do about it?
>
> I needed to know what to do about it. Not knowing the why, I decided I
> couldn't trust the rescue system and improvised a workaround that
> involved installing a new Debian system on a spare partition on
> /dev/hda2 (fortunately I still had some space) and using *its* lilo to
> establish bootability of /dev/hdc3.
>
> I know that Debian has ways of futzing the BIOS so that drive letters
> are different from the standard ones. What I don't know is why it
> decided to do this as a rescue attempt. My lack of understanding made
> the rescue system untrustable, hence unusable. And I'm not at all sure
> that posting the details on, say, debian-user would have resulted in an
> answer sufficiently authoritative to be trustworthy.
>
Hi hendrik
I would have called it a bug in the installer and submitted it. It
would end up on debian-boot where a trustworthy reply should have been
available.
If you have a chance, make a current daily-build netinst.iso an see if
the problem still exists. If it doesn, file a bug.
Doug.
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