Package: partman-base
Frans Pop [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote : > The correct way to report this would be to file a bug report [1] against > the package "partman-base". That will make sure it is brought to the > attention of the debian-installer team and that its resolution will be > tracked in the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS). > > Could you please do that? Original text : I noticed, that when the debian installer is instructed to create two partitions, whose joint size is less than the size of the disk, then it creates one primary partition and one logical partition inside an extended partition. The issue is, that this extended partition has the size of the logical partition and not the maximum possible size (the entire empty disk space plus the logical parition). This layout seems to be special to debian, since all other distros (except debian based ones) and operating systems create extended partitions that cover the entire free disk space. This becomes a problem, when the user want to create a new partition. He has two options : - create a primary partition up side : easy to do, no problems down side : as two slots are used for the original primary partition and the extended partition, only two remain. Also more than than one primary partition is unrecomended and can be problemtatic in certain environments. - change the size of the extended partition and create logical partition(s) upside : no limits on number of partitions, no other problems downside : very few partitioning tools support this in asimple and obvious way. The most common ones (fdisk, Windows Disk Management) for example do not. My question is : What benefit does the debian way give ? Is there a possibility to change for the other "common" way ? For reference I also include the results of a small research about this on various op-systems : I started their CD based installer and in their partitioner, I created two partitions (a single partition setup usually creates a primary partition, so that would not cover our topic). I always used the default settings and values, except the following : - I asked creation of exactly two partitions - I specified their size (the sum of their sizes is less than the disk size) - for linux, I specified the partition type for the second partition as "swap" (the first partition was formatted by the default FS and used for / - root fs) That's it. The results : win XP : extended partition covers entire disk win 98 : extended partition covers entire disk debian 2.0 hamm : extended partition covers only used part of disk redhat 5.2 : extended partition covers entire disk debian 3.1 sarge : extended partition covers only used part of disk fedora 4 : extended partition covers entire disk (FC4 : I created 4 partitions, otherwise no extended partition would be created, but 3 primary partitions) As we see, the "small extended partition" is a debianism. Notes : "entire disk" means "entire disk minus the part used by the primary partition" "only used part of disk" means "the space used by the logical partition" Regards, David --------------------------------------------------------------------- http://noepatents.eu.org/ Innovation, not litigation ! --- David Balazic mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] HERMES Softlab http://www.hermes-softlab.com Zagrebska cesta 104 Phone: +386 2 450 8846 SI-2000 Maribor Slovenija --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Be excellent to each other." - Bill S. Preston, Esq. & "Ted" Theodore Logan ---------------------------------------------------------------------