sfdisk problem?

[Marc Martinez]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 05:27:05PM -0500, justin wrote:
> 
> Hey Marc,
> 
> I'd definitely be interested in testing the sfdisk package.  What I've

the problem is that the 'util-linux' package includes lots of
important things, and sfdisk is a fairly rarely used program among
them.  this is why I'm reluctant to put together a full package
release, and I'm not sure if I finished the backport work to the
regular fdisk program and such (which would definitely be desirable
for a packaged version).  to get you up and rolling for the time being
I'll send along a gzip'ed binary privately so as not to bloat the list
archives.

> been spending the last 45 minutes or so doing has been patching the patch
> to work w/ my configuration.  One bug that I found was the patch wasn't
> taking empty partitions into account.  i.e. There are a couple zero size
> partitions on my current install client.  This errors out setup_harddisks
> because it attempts to divide by zero via:
> 
> $PartOldStart{$device} = int ($2 / $DiskUnits{$disk});

actually I don't think this has to do with my patch, or at least the
parts of it I originally worked out .. I saw odd zero handling as well
in the beginning when I was trying to preserve partition 3, with 1 and
2 populated for the fai-boot and root filesystems.  no disk space was
allocated for the first 2 partitions, but all the extended area ones
came out fine.  since the damn smart-start utilities couldn't seem to
keep a consistent partition number allocated across the existing
servers I had installed to reference with, but did use a predictable
area of the disk, I hacked up a seperate script to relocate the system
partition to #1 using the same block areas.  after that the
setup_harddisks was able to lay out everything fine according to my
size guidelines.

> However this throws off the script in a couple areas so I'd rather get a
> good binary than tear it apart any further :-D

yes, the script is quite "fragile", and I saw lots of areas for small
improvements and things that made me go "ugh", but thankfully Thomas
has decided to re-implement it in the future, and it sounds like the
replacement will be much nicer to work with.

in any case, it sounds like you're getting really close, shouldn't be
much left to sort out from here..

Marc