Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 24 January 2005 21:55, Jeff Vian wrote:
>On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:30 -0500, William Hooper wrote:
>> Jeff Vian said:
>> [snip]
>>
>> >> So by your own reasoning, we need
>> >> to remove DD complete and just put a dialog that asks where to
>> >> put / and put everything there.  That's it.
>> >
>> > That is EXACTLY what _was_ done by putting in the autopartition
>> > option. and the opposite is what I feel would be better.
>>
>> Autopartition option... not requirement.
>
>agreed
>
>> > BTW William,
>> > Much earlier in this thread you asked me a question about DD and
>> > its partitioning related to what it did for me. I recently did a
>> > new install and checked carefully the results.
>> >
>> > 1.  DD chose the order to place the partitions.  That was NOT
>> > the order they were defined in.  I created / as the second
>> > partition, but DD chose to make it hda5 on its own.  It
>> > displayed the order in the gui bar dynamically as they were
>> > defined (in its own order, but with sizes as specified)
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> Which is as I observed.  The comment I was responding to said that
>> DD changed somewhere between what the GUI says and what was
>> written to the disk.  I'm still waiting for a repeatable case of
>> that, BTW.

I may have miss-spoken about that in my haste raise hell and to stick 
a brick under one corner of this thing.  The times I can recall its 
happening seem to be also times I noticed it as being displayed that 
way.  One backs up and tries to fix it, and when you've got it all 
fixed and ready for the final view, and its back to being setup 
according to DD.  After a while, you get tired of beating your head 
against the wall and just click ok in disgust.  It had moved 
the /boot partition of 100 megs to /dev/hda8 on one occasion that I 
recall a couple of years ago.  Thats when I found I could get to 
fdisk and do it my way.  Then when I started this install, and found 
there was no shell waiting for me when I did the usual ctl+alt+F2, 
just a blank screen, and that did pull my trigger.

>In my case, I said DD changed from what I specified to what it
> wrote.

This is true, nearly everytime I've tangled with it I've come away 
with an excedrin headache.  Heck, if that "re-arrange to suit 
whatever it thinks is good" was removed, that would go one hell of a 
long ways toward making me happy.  And in no case should it ever put 
the /boot on an extended partition 87 GB into a 120 GB disk.

>I do not recall in the last use of DD (much more than a year ago
> with RH9) how the gui and the list related to the order I defined
> them in.  I know it was not what I expected and thus IMNSHO at that
> time it was broke and I began using fdisk exclusively.
>
>> > This type of (at least somewhat uncontrollable) AI is what I see
>> > as a problem.  Even Partition Magic on Windows respects the
>> > order in which partitions are defined and positions them
>> > accordingly.  DD does not.
>>
>> For the vast majority of people it doesn't make a lot of
>> difference. Framing the installer around special cases is the path
>> to insanity.
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> > Why not 2 major paths in the installer?  one for the Expert and
>> > one for the new user.
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> We've been there and done that and got the T-shirt.  All it leads
>> to is going around in circles until someone finally mentions "Oh,
>> and I hit that thing that said expert at the beginning".
>
>Now you see the problem that hits ALL tech support staff.
>__Communication__.
>
>However, that still does not justify making it more difficult for
> those who _do_ have a clue.

And thats my point precisely.  The current way around in DD means it 
still has a final say-so, because you cannot proceed without its 
apparent writes to the bootblocks.  If I have setup what I want in 
fdisk, then there needs to be some method thats obvious, for one to 
get out of DD without its touching the drive, and let anaconda 
proceed to format what it can see by doing its own read of the 
bootblocks for the partition table AS IT EXISTS at that point in 
time.  At that point, if it appears that a mke2fs has already been 
done at some point, either now or maybe 5 years ago, anaconda needs 
to ask if the data on this partition is to be wiped.  Even Joe 
Sixpack ought to be able to grab a pencil and paper and keep track of 
that.  Particularly if he was prompted to do so by anaconda "just for 
future record keeping" if nothing else.

>> IMHO the fdisk situation is the perfect way to fix it.  People
>> that care that strongly can get to it, the other 90% who don't
>> give a damn can go through the install.  Of all the threads on
>> this list, how many of them are about partitioning during the
>> install (other than "how big should I make /var" and the like)?  I
>> really believe this is a mole hill, not a mountain.

For those of us whove been playing with computers since the later 
1970's, it is a mountain because we tend to get set in our ways by 
finding out what works, one we don't need to climb when a few lines 
of code would give us a nice fast highway around it.

>For partitioning you are likely right. (Yes, I do tech support so I
> also have been there and got the T-shirt.) Once I understand what
> is happening the unexpected is not so unexpected nor unmanageable.
>
>> --
>> William Hooper

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.