selectively delete partitions

[Stephen Mah]

>I've used sfdisk to do this in the past, if you want to keep only the
>first partition, you can do something like this in a %pre:
>
>sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /tmp/sfdisk.sda
>egrep '^(unit|/dev/sda1 )' /tmp/sfdisk.sda | sfdisk
>
>Note that in this example there is a space after sda1, which may be
>important if you have a lot of partitions and don't want it to keep
>sda10 or sda11 for example.  You can also replace the egrep with
>whatever you want to do to keep the correct partitions.  For example,
>if you want to just keep the Linux partitions (type 83), you could do
>this:
>
>(egrep '^units' /tmp/sfdisk.sda; egrep 'ID=( 5|83)' /tmp/sfdisk.sda) | sfdisk
>
>You may or may not need the 5 (the extended partition) depending on
>your requirements.
>
>I've also setup systems to keep the first linux partition and the
>first swap partition like this:
>
>%pre
>sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /tmp/sfdisk.sda
>(
>    head -3 /tmp/sfdisk.sda
>    (
>        grep Id=82 /tmp/sfdisk.sda | head -1
>        grep Id=83 /tmp/sfdisk.sda | head -1
>    ) | sort
>) | sfdisk
>
>(These systems didn't have anything I wanted to keep on the extended
>partition, so keep that in mind.)
>  
>
thank you, I'll try that later. That's exactly what I was looking for.

-steve