On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:14:34PM -0500, Erik Dykema wrote: > >> Things that seem curious: > >> Why is mkinitd caring about my hardware devices, doesn't it just > >>need to see the files in /target?
> >mkinitrd needs to build an initrd that will be able to find the real > >root device after booting. If /target/dev/cciss doesn't exist, mkinitrd > >has nothing to work from to figure out what the correct device is. > >IIRC, devfs is not actually used in the target, only in the root; so > >probably d-i needs to know how to map /dev/cciss/disc0/partX to a > >non-devfs device name (and make sure this mapped device is available in > >the target, i.e., MAKEDEV). > Ok, I think I understand a little better now. My next question is, > I think, how does it get fixed? It looks like Mr. Lovergine had a > similar problem in this thread: > http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2003/debian-boot-200312/msg00605.html I don't have an answer for that, as I haven't worked on that part of the d-i code. Hopefully, someone else can shed some light. > >> Why are there 3 partitions, there are only two in cfdisk (ext2, > >>swap). Unless it counts a few megs of free space as another partition. > >You seem to have created one primary and one logical (extended) > >partition. part5 would be the first logical partition in a DOS > >partition table, and is contained within whichever one of part1 or part2 > >is the extended partition. > Here you are correct as well, it turns out that partition 1 was a 34 > gig ext2 partition, and partition 2 was a 1 gig logical partition > containing partition 5 which was also 1 gig. I am very curious as to > why it is so. This partition setup was created by the autopartition > part of the installer, why would it use those logical partition things? > It seems a complicated way to do it. No idea, really. The boot partition needs to be a primary partition so that it can be marked bootable, and using logical partitions gives you the flexibility to support more than 4 partitions on the disk, but obviously only 2 real partitions were created... This seems overly complicated to me as well, since you're not likely to want to take space away from your swap partition to make another partition. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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