setup-storage and preserving partitions

[Toomas Tamm]

Hello!

Here are the latest test results, using FAI 3.4~beta4+experimental4 ,
setup-storage 1.2.1+exp . See attachment.

For the first time, setup-storage ran to completion with my inputs.
Congratulations!

There are some things to remark, however:

1) At some point, it gets a series of "Use of uninitialized value"
errors. Please note that in the attached file, I moved the messages
around a little bit to improve readability. In the original format.log,
they appear in the middle of the "desired disk layout" output, a result
of mixing stdout and stderr.

2) It is discomforting to see all the "parted -s /dev/hda mkpart"
commands being queued. Does not match my understanding of "preserving a
partition". What if, for some reason, the parameters are in error and
the partitions get messed up? I would like to define "preserving" as
"not touching at all". Would that be difficult to implement?

3) It seems that many (all?) of the "parted -s /dev/hda mkpart" get
executed twice. If they can not be totally eliminated, one pass should
suffice?

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?

In a summary, in my mind the only commands which should be queued are
the  mkfs.ext3  and  mkswap  commands. Would that be achievable?

Best regards,

Toomas

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