Emmanuel Seyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It could start by not zeroing partitions on disk drives uninvolved in > > the OS installation, since there is no reason for it to do that.
> This is the part where I don't follow you. If partitions have not > been created, how is the kickstart program supposed to know which > drives are involved in the installation and which ones are not? I'm not sure I understand your confusion -- the answer to this is obvious: Clearly Kickstart knows which disk drives it is going to put partitions onto before it does so. Such is a logical requirement, or it would never be able to issue the "mkfs" command that actually does the work of creating a new filesystem. All Kickstart has to do to behave properly here is to refrain from issuing an "fdisk" command for the very same disk drives for which it refrains from issuing "mkfs" commands. Furthermore, in the specific case we were talking about, I told Kickstart to put partitions *only* on hda. Therefore, it knew well in advance that the only drive involved in the installation was hda. > > Other improvements might be for it to put up a splash screen at the very > > beginning of the process, detailing exactly what the installer is going > > to do, which disk drives it is going to muck with, and which partitions > > it is going to destory, and then ask the user to type "confirm" or > > somesuch. > This sounds a lot like the procedure you go through when you abstain > from telling kickstart to wipe out the partitions. First of all, it is completely different, because you might generate a Kickstart config a year before actually using it; the person running Kickstart might be a completely different person from the person who configured it; and you might run the same Kickstart config harmlessly on a hundred computers, and then on the hundred and first it might be run on a different hardware config where where the result of its execution would be quite detrimental. (For instance, it might be run a hundred times to upgrade a hundred desktop workstations, and then later it might be run on the departmental fileserver that has 100 disk drives on it. I bet most people would like to have some sort of explicit reminder that their OS installer will wipe all the data on 99 disk drives as a side-effect of installing the OS onto one of the disk drives.) Furthermore, Kickstart needs to be able to reset the partition tables on drives that *are* involved in the OS install, so I would hardly wish to tell it not to. |>oug -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
