Frans Pop wrote:
It's not a mistake to do this. Partitioning a drive means you want to have it in several pieces. I don't want to have it in several pieces, so I just use the whole drive. I've been doing this for many years without the slightest problem or issue anywhere under any circumstances. I've just never done it with the boot volume before, and I don't see why it should be any different.No need to CC me; I obviously read the lists (well, one of them anyway). On Sunday 20 April 2008, John Anthony Kazos Jr. wrote:Yes, but the problem is that the partition is /dev/hdd, not /dev/hdd1.Sounds to me like a mistake was made when the filesystem was created. It was apparently created by running 'mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdd' instead of'mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdd1', which probably means that the partition table information was destroyed.
It also means, if you want to keep the existing data on /dev/hdd, that you cannot "repartition" that device using partman, nor install Debian to that drive. You'll have to fix the error first by saving your data somewhere, create a proper partition table and then copy the data back to a partition.Maybe it is possible to do all this while keeping the data on hdd, but I would not bet on it and I certainly don't know how.The partitioner is incapable of recognizing /dev/hdd as an ext3 volume, and the install base system refuses to proceed without the partitioner giving the go-ahead.That is correct. The installer does not support unpartitioned devices, so you cannot install Debian to /dev/hdd. Installing Debian to it in the current situation would destroy the existing data and, as you said you wanted to keep the data, that seems like a bad move.Cheers, FJP
Well, I guess I'll just have to deal with it then. I can crack the case and install another hard drive, install Debian, copy the data -back- over, and take the drive back out again. Since none of the e2+3fs utilities for Windows XP are letting me mount the drive either.
It just seems like quite a silly thing, that we can boot to RAID, we can boot to LVM, we can even boot over the network, but we can't manage to boot to one cylinder of a disk drive.