Problems forcing FAI-reinstall using bootsector and grub

[Niklaus Giger]

Hi

I did run into problems preserving partitions in the following circumstances:
- The BIOS boot order is HDD-0 (/dev/hdd), LAN
- I booted into a FAI-install form LAN and  partitioned the whole harddisk for 
my system "ob"
- I used the classes MBR, GRUB and BOOT in order to be able to boot the next 
time from the HDD0. 
- After booting I had the expected parititions among other (/dev/hdd9 -> /home 
and /dev/hdd10 -> /data)
- I changed the parition commands to preserve the /dev/hdd9 and and /dev/hdd10
- As I wanted to correct some errors I entered "bootsector -d /dev/hdd".
- After rebooting, starting the FAI-Installer via LAN I get the following 
error
"FAI: setup harddisks V0.24fai"
"Disks found: hdd"
"sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature"

Under other circumstances (which I do not remeber exactly how to reproduce 
them) I also encountered the following problems:
a) The BIOS tries to boot HDD-0 and I after the message "GRUB Loading starge 
1.5." I get stuck (here I think I did not finish the FAI-Installation).
b) During the FIA setup_harddisks complains with
"parsing config file: /fai/disk_config/ob"
"ERROR: unable to preserve partition /dev/hdd9. Partition is not DOS aligned. 
at /sbin/setup_harddisks line 442, <FILE> line 9."

I really do not understand in detail what happened here. Can anybody specify a 
sane way who to safely reforce a FAI installation? I think it might be 
sufficient/better/easier to add a GRUB-menu entry for "a Fully Automatic 
reInstallation" into the grub/menu.lst. Could this be a feature for FAI 2.5?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Best regards

-- 
Niklaus Giger
Wieshoschet 6
CH-8753 Mollis
Tel. ++41 55 612 20 54 (privat)
Tel. ++41 55 618 64 68 (Geschäft)