Hi John,
A similar answer from me: I no longer maintain util-linux -
letter cc-ed to Adrian Bunk, current maintainer.
Concerning disks without active partitions:
sfdisk warns:
warn(_("Warning: no primary partition is marked bootable (active)\n"
"This does not matter for LILO, but the DOS MBR will "
"not boot this disk.\n"));
I agree that if other fdisk versions do not mutter in a similar way,
it would be an improvement to make them do so.
Andries
On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 09:37:09AM +1000, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I'm no longer involved with Parted, although I think the general principle
> is a good idea. Parted does have a "check" facility, but it is quite
> superficial at the moment, and can't recognize many common problems.
>
> I'm sure the new Parted maintainers would be interested in patches ;)
>
> Cheers,
> Andrew
>
> On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 07:49:29AM +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> > Andries
> > Andrew
> > I've been caught a couple of times on this.
> >
> > We needed to rebuild a Windows SBS server to a new disk, and resize the
> > C: and D: (actually it was labelled F: but never mind) partitions.
> >
> > As far as I could tell (and I tried), I could not copy C: from Windows,
> > so we ended up copying the source disk (80 Gb) with dd on Knoppix to the
> > target (bigger than 80 Gb) and mucking around with fdisk and/or cfdisk.
> >
> > Once we realised there was no active partition and rectified that it
> > worked a treat, but it could have taken a _very_ long time for us to
> > realise the problem, and many folk wouldn't have.
> >
> >
> > It's not always a mistake to have no active partition (eg Linux only),
> > but it often is, particularly when it's the boot drive and
> > DOS/Windows/Darwin is involved.
> >
> > I suggest that the disk partitioning tools in util-linux, and parted, be
> > altered so as to warn the user when the partition table being written
> > has one or more non-linux primary partitions and none of them is marked
> > active.
> >
> > What do you think?
> >
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