setup-storage and windows 7

[Gémes Géza]

Hi

First of all thank you, that is really good news. I have just some more
questions below:
> On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 07:23 +0100, Gémes Géza wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> After some digging of the mail archives I've found that my problem is
>> quite general:
>>
>> Partitioning with fai a disk which had windows 7 installed and trying to
>> preserve that installation.
> The information that you report is interesting and useful indeed. I have
> not done a dual-boot install for a while (we have switched to running
> Windows inside Virtualbox VMs instead), but Michael Tautschnig (the main
> author of setup-storage) implemented a couple of useful changes in the
> experimental series:
>
Does that mean the experimental branch of the git repo?
> - if the "preserve_always:all" flag is present, this means literally "do
> not touch any partitioning information at all".
Do the preserve_always flag has other possible attributes besides all?
> - primary partitions on disk need not be physically in the same order as
> in the partition table.
>
> The first one allows for manual re-partitioning of the disk (I usually
> used the Windows 7 built-in partitioning tool to shrink the primary
> Windows partition to necessary size, then gparted to create an extended
> partition with logical partitions for Linux in the free space). This
> does not scale to massive installs, but worked well for a small number
> of laptops.
That is not a problem, because the partitioning can be automated by
other means (I've already implemented different solutions to this (e.g
pxeboot a sysreccd distribution with an autorun script)
> The second patch is useful in conjunction with the first one if there is
> a "recovery" partition at the end of the Windows disk. This is usually
> the third partition in the partition table, and the extended partition,
> created as just explained, becomes fourth in the PT, but third on the
> disk. Setup-storage does not create such layouts, but can preserve them
> if asked to do so.
>
> Finally, here is a typical disk configuration file for installing a dual
> boot host.
>
> # This computer comes with a boot partition as sda1, a C:
> # partition as sda2, a recovery parition as sda3,
> # and Linux is installed into the extended partition sda4
> # physically located in the middle of the disk.
> #
> # We preserve the size and location of everything, 
> # but create new filesystems. The actual partitioning is done
> # manually before executing FAI.
> #
> # The ordering of lines in this file is very important!
>
> disk_config disk1 bootable:1 preserve_always:all always_format:5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12
> primary  -         0   -     -
> primary  -         0   -     -
> primary  -         0   -     -
> logical  /         0   ext3  rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro   createopts="-c -j"
> logical  swap      0   swap  sw
> logical  /var      0   ext3  rw,relatime                     createopts="-m 5 -j"
> logical  /tmp      0   ext3  rw                              createopts="-m 0 -j"
> logical  /usr      0   ext3  rw,relatime                     createopts="-j"
> logical  /home     0   ext3  rw,relatime,nosuid,nodev        createopts="-m 1 -j"
> logical  /vm       0   ext2  rw,relatime,nosuid,nodev        createopts="-m 1"
> logical  /wrk      0   ext3  rw,relatime,nosuid,nodev        createopts="-m 1 -j"
>
>
>
Thank you!

Geza