setup-storage and preserving partitions

[Michael Tautschnig]

[...]

> 
> > 4) There is a "parted -s /dev/hda resize 3" command. Partition 3 is the
> > extended partition. As we discussed before, it can not be added to the
> > perserve list.
> > 
> > In my case, it seems that the empty space which used to be at the end of
> > partition 3 (partition ends at 74447009279B) will be moved out of it
> > (partition being resized to 73945267199B, to coincide with the end of
> > hda12, the last logical partition). This makes the empty space unusable
> > for future partitions, because it will now be located between partitions
> > 3 (extended) and 4 (primary) and nothing can be put into it without
> > re-extending partition 3 again. So why shrink it in the first place?
> > 
> > Perhaps "preserving an extended partition" is not such a bad (or
> > useless) notion after all?
> > 
> 
> Ok, that I'll have to look into properly, it's getting too late... It's
> intentional that the extended partition is just as large as necessary, but I
> have no idea why this is achieved via resize. Looks like a bug, but I'll have to
> double-check.
> 

[...]

Hmm, no, not really a bug. Some time ago apparently I decided that whenever a
logical parition is to be preserved the underlying extended partition must also
be preserved in some way. Well, and resizing seemed to be a proper approach. Ok,
setup-storage is not as clever as to understand that free space outside the
extended partition is not as good as free space inside the extended partition
*in this case*. We could add some logic to achieve this, but I wonder if it is
worth the trouble: If you just add a logical partition in your config, even
without a mount point, and a size of "0-" you'll get the extended partition
maximized. Well, unless there is some other bug :-)

Hope this helps,
Michael

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/linux-fai/attachments/20100702/5df3d402/attachment.bin