FAI partitioning question

[R. F. Grant]

Hello,

We dual boot most of our PCs, and the Windows installer is provided by
our central it services department, using a CD. This creates a
custom-sized Windows partition as the first partition on the drive.

I don't know if they have changed the installer recently, or if it is
because we have moved to a new kernel for our FAI install, but now when
I try to preserve sda1 and create new partitions in FAI I get an error:

ERROR: Unable to preserve partition /dev/sda1. Partition is not DOS
aligned. at /usr/sbin/setup_harddisks version 0.40fai

Running cfdisk on /dev/sda at this point does show a slightly odd
partitioning system:

Name         Flags         Part Type         FS Type         [Label]  
      Size (MB)
                                      Pri/Log            Free space     
                     1.05*
sda1            Boot           Primary           NTFS                 
                  41943.044
                                      Pri/Log            Free space     
                      118095.24*


This little bit of blank space at the start of the disk does not seem to
be something we can control.

The disk partition scheme I am using in FAI is:

disk_config sda
primary  -             preserve1
primary  /             4000-20000        rw ;reiser
logical  swap          2050-3000    rw
logical /usr/local     4000-40000  rw ;reiser

I notice that sfdisk, which setup_harddisks actually uses to do the
partitioning, has a -D option to allow DOS compatability. And, in fact,
running sfdisk -D on the drive after FAI drops out does actually work.

The question, then: is there some parameter I can get FAI to pass to
setup_harddisks so that it will format in DOS compatability mode? Or
some equivalent work around?

If I install FAI first (creating a blank sda1 partition) then presumably
this would not be an issue, but this is not always possible, and I don't
really want to have to reinstall Windows every time I reinstall Linux....

I am using fai 3.1.8, with a custom-made etch kernel.

Regards,

Richard Grant
Senior Computer Officer
University of Leicester