Douglas Alan said: > In that case, you can explicitly delete these partitions or configure the > install program to delete these partitions for you, rather than have the > install program *automatically* delete them for you.
looking at the kickstart docs(again never used it myself), there seems to be an option to delete only linux partitions, so MSWin32 partitions would be unaffected. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/s1-ksconfig-partitions.html To clear the Master Boot Record, select Yes beside the option on the top of the window. You can choose to keep the existing partitions, remove all the existing partitions, or remove all the existing Linux partitions by selecting None, All, or Linux, respectively, next to Remove Partitions. > Exactly. But my standard config is limited to the boot disk drive. In > fact, I explicitly told Kickstart to *only* make partitions on the boot > disk drive. It has no good reason to mess with the partition tables of > disk drives that it is not putting partitions onto. In your view yes, in my view no. Just seeing the words "Remove all existing partitions", immediately meant to me, it will remove every partition on the system(hence the 'all'). And again, I've never used kickstart so thats a view from an outsider(though I have used solaris jumpstart). I do admit though the documentation should be improved to make this information more clear. Maybe they could also introduce another option "Remove partitions on configured disks only". So that if you specify a partition table it will wipe the partition table on that particular disk(s) rather then all disks on the system. > Indeed. How does this imply that the OS installer should delete > patitions on drives it was told not to put partitions onto? Because you told it to :) (again, a documentation issue I think, the behavior is good in my view) > It's not my job to backup anyone's data. That's each user's > responsibility. Nor did I have a place to back it up to, even if I had > wanted to. And the only reason I was doing an OS install, is because the > Red Hat upgrader made the computer unbootable. Debian's upgrader has never made my systems unbootable, infact it explicitly will NOT upgrade the kernel on any system automatically, even during major(2.2->3.0) upgrades. Not sure what made your machine unbootable but doing a SuSE 7.3->8.0 upgrade last yer on my sister's dual p2 machine made it unbootable(ACPI drivers causing the system to freeze, had to recompile the kernel since they didn't have a packaged SMP kernel w/o ACPI). though debian isn't for everyone of course.. nate -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
