disk partitioning (again)

[John G. Heim]

From: "Michael Tautschnig" <mt at debian.org>
To: <linux-fai at uni-koeln.de>
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 12:43 PM
> Hmm, setup-storage does have a man page, but it may be hard to distill 
> that
> particular aspect. I'll try to produce a suitable config below. I'm not 
> qui=
> te
> sure about the sizes, made a guess there.

Yeah, thanks. I wasn't sure how to create an extended partition. Probably my 
ignorance of what an extended partition actually is. I'm kind of a 
partitioning monkey, I don't understand it but I know what to type to make 
it work.  And I couldn't just experiment because I still have that problem I 
asked about last week where it preserves the Windows 7 partition but Windows 
7 won't boot. I found out that it happens only when *I* install Windows 7 
and then do an FAI install. I'm installing Windows 7 via an unattended.xml 
answer file. If someone else installs Win7 by just popping a CD in and 
answering all the questions, it works. So I must be doing something in my 
unattended Win7 install that setup-storage doesn't like.  But that's why I 
couldn't experiment, I can't keep asking people to re-install Win7 for me.

Once I get everything else fixed, I'm going to get back to that problem with 
saving my own Win7 install.

> disk_config sda preserve_always:1
> primary -     0       -     -
> logical /     35G     ext3  rw,noatime,errors=3Dremount-ro
> logical swap  1500M   swap  rw   =20

That seems to have done the trick. I made the range for the root partition 
20G-500G hoping that will make it take up whatever is left after preserving 
the ntfs partition and swap. We'll see, I'm doing an install now.

A couple of tips (for the archive, I'm sure everyone on this list already 
knows this stuff)....
1. A good way to test a new setup-storage config is to make a file named for 
your test machine. My test machine has hostname vv507g so I made my test 
setup-storage config vv507g. That way the rest of my installs use the old 
config files while I'm working on a new one.

2. You can run setup-storage at the command line to test your config files:

# setup-storage -d -f vv507g

This is safe. It doesn't do anything unless you pass the -x flag.