Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

Les Mikesell les at futuresource.com
Wed Jan 19 14:57:45 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 08:27, Gene Heskett wrote:

> The screwups in my cases were nearly identical, starting with its 
> ignoring the drives existing partition table, making up its own 
> tables up out of whole cloth, and putting /boot in /dev/hda5, which I 
> don't believe works, ever.

Please post how to repeat this.  I've never seen it ignore existing
partitions unless you told it to remove them.

> It needs to 1) show you what its going to do to *every disk in the 
> system*, and 2) what it does show you is to be carved in stone, not 
> re-arranged willy-nilly after you've clicked on the next button.  And 
> it needs to be capable of being completely bypassed in the case of 
> already having a known good partition table you don't want messed 
> with.

It will only re-arrange when it is creating the partitions.  If they
are already fdisk'ed in place it will use them.  It doesn't make sense
to bypass it since you have to have told it where to install or there
is no reason to continue.  Just pull your boot/install CD (or
whatever) out and reboot if you don't want to go on.

> The last time I spent probably 15 minutes wandering around in it 
> trying to figure out a way out of it without its doing anything, and 
> finally split up /dev/hdb into two small partitions and an already 
> existing /swap just so it had something to do, and it completely 
> wiped the system when I clicked next.

Again, I've never seen it remove partitions unless told to do so.
Please show how to repeat this so it can be fixed.

> Everyone defending it claims it can do so much more than fdisk, but 
> I've yet to see any evidence of this greater capability, other than 
> its capability of totally screwing things up.  If there is a list of 
> increased capabilities DD has that fdisk doesn't, then lets see a 
> list of them, right here in front of all us frogs so we can debate 
> the utility of each of these capabilities.  I'll even leave some room 
> here for them to be listed:

Fdisk does nothing but set partition sizes and type codes.  DD sets
up RAID, LVM, filesystem types, mount points, and swap space.  

> fdisk works just fine, whats the problem with bringing it back as an 
> option for those of us who are used to it?

People who are used to it are generally also used the the shell which
is still available, and fdisk still works fine.  But, you still have
to figure out why DD didn't keep your existing partitions or the same
thing will happen after you run fdisk and try to assign the filesystems
to the partitions.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com





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