Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 18 January 2005 05:08, Tony Dietrich wrote:
[...]
>>
>> Ok, I'll compromise, on the next go-round (read that as FC4) that
>> the man pages can be made readable, from the installers only
>> screen since a ctl+_alt+F2 only gets you a blank screen at that
>> point in the install.  We *know* how to make fdisk work, and it
>> makes perfect sense in what it tells you, so why not make it
>> available instead of making us all into windows idiots against our
>> will?  theres never been a windows install around here, and never
>> will be.
>>
>> >--
>> >Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org
>> > <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux      ------>
>> >          <http://linux.bu.edu/>
>>
>> --
>
>Gene ...
>
>Did you select 'Manually configure' and take a look at the options?

Yes, and none of them made any sense in terms of what I wanted to do. 
It did not show me at *any* time, the partitions that already existed 
on that disk, and that were fully, 100% bootable if I had removed the 
cd and hit the reset button at that point.

>Just a query ... some of your answers made it sound like you hadn't
> gone down that route.

Yes I did go down that route.  And I read good (american) english but 
couldn't seem to grok that screen at all.  I at least expect the tool 
to show me whats there, in a comprehendable format, if indeed there 
is anything pre-existing.  And there was a full FC2 install on it 
when I started.  But it wouldn't show me anything that I didn't 
enter.  And not recalling the exact geometry, I canceled out of it 
and gave up.  I didn't want to lose what I had, but of course I did.

I used to think, back about rh5.2 or 6.0, that DD was showing promise 
of being a useable program eventually, but IMO its only gone downhill 
from there.

>The Auto option is dreadful, as IMHO it doesn't explain clearly
> enough to the novice what it is about to do.  Fine for a novice who
> doesn't want to know all about partitions, but that same novice
> needs to know that he's about to wipe out his Windows installation
> too .. spelt out in LARGE EASY WORDS!

Damned betcha.
>
>But the Manual option allows me to retain everything *I* want, and
> make sure items are where I want them.  Only ever needed to drop to
> fdisk when I wanted to do something weird.

All I ever wanted was to do it my way, preserving what I had, WHERE I 
had it.

But right now, unless I can backup some of what I've written for a 
driver for BDI-Live, I'm not touching that machine with another 
fedora disk, I've got too much time in that part of it now.  If I do 
anything, it will be on a fresh drive, so I have the old one to 
recover from.  Backing it up isn't a big deal though.  I can setup an 
amanda client on it in half an hour, but its rarely on when amanda 
runs in the wee hours.  rsync is probably the best bet.  Then take 
that old noisy WD 46GB drive down and play with it as hda.

But not tonight, I need to run up to Bridgeport & see about some 
nickle-print paint. I have some truely jurrasic (nearly 50 years old) 
16 watt bulk carbon resistors to see if I can fix.  Half inch 
diameter solid carbon rods, about 3.5" long, with some sort of 
metalic plating on the ends so they fit in 30 amp fuse holder clips.  
I think the plating is failing as they are creeping up in value just 
enough to unbalance a pair of 3CX2500 tubes about 30%.  Needless to 
say, they are made out of absolutely 100% pure unobtainium in the 
year 2005.  The last production run at IRC was probably back in the 
middle 1960's.  Carbon normally has a pretty big negative tempco, but 
these are showing a huge positive amount.  Bring a 6.3 up to 100F and 
its over 7.0 ohms.  Not good.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.