setup-storage and preserving partitions

[Toomas Tamm]

On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 13:08 -0600, Jeffrey Stolte wrote:

> (I should mention that one of our main uses of FAI is to upgrade
> machines from one Debian release to the next.  However, rather than do
> an in-place upgrade, we do a fresh install of the new release while
> preserving the existing partition sizes on the disk.)
> 
> I hope this makes some sense.  If no one else has asked for this
> capability, though, maybe we need to reconsider our practice of
> preserving partition sizes.  I don't want you to have to add an option
> that no one else uses or that is not considered to be a "best
practice".
> Let me know if you need any additional information.  Thanks.

I would cast another vote towards adding such an option. Our use case is
the following: we have several dual-booting laptops where the Windows
partition(s), as well as the master boot record (which may contain
manufacturer-specific code to access recovery partitions, etc) should be
touched as little as possible. Just as the above user, we prefer fresh
installs to in-place upgrades.

It would feel very reassuring if there were an option in FAI which
essentially meant "do not touch anything in disk paritioning, just
create new filesystems on existing partitions where requested, and leave
all the rest unchanged".

In today's situation, I always feel an urge to test my setups (based on
hooks and/or manual intervention) several times on a "disposable" test
machine before I dare to run FAI on a "real" system.

Toomas Tamm