Hi First of all thank you, that is really good news. I have just some more questions below: > On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 07:23 +0100, Gémes Géza wrote: >> Hi, >> >> After some digging of the mail archives I've found that my problem is >> quite general: >> >> Partitioning with fai a disk which had windows 7 installed and trying to >> preserve that installation. > The information that you report is interesting and useful indeed. I have > not done a dual-boot install for a while (we have switched to running > Windows inside Virtualbox VMs instead), but Michael Tautschnig (the main > author of setup-storage) implemented a couple of useful changes in the > experimental series: > Does that mean the experimental branch of the git repo? > - if the "preserve_always:all" flag is present, this means literally "do > not touch any partitioning information at all". Do the preserve_always flag has other possible attributes besides all? > - primary partitions on disk need not be physically in the same order as > in the partition table. > > The first one allows for manual re-partitioning of the disk (I usually > used the Windows 7 built-in partitioning tool to shrink the primary > Windows partition to necessary size, then gparted to create an extended > partition with logical partitions for Linux in the free space). This > does not scale to massive installs, but worked well for a small number > of laptops. That is not a problem, because the partitioning can be automated by other means (I've already implemented different solutions to this (e.g pxeboot a sysreccd distribution with an autorun script) > The second patch is useful in conjunction with the first one if there is > a "recovery" partition at the end of the Windows disk. This is usually > the third partition in the partition table, and the extended partition, > created as just explained, becomes fourth in the PT, but third on the > disk. Setup-storage does not create such layouts, but can preserve them > if asked to do so. > > Finally, here is a typical disk configuration file for installing a dual > boot host. > > # This computer comes with a boot partition as sda1, a C: > # partition as sda2, a recovery parition as sda3, > # and Linux is installed into the extended partition sda4 > # physically located in the middle of the disk. > # > # We preserve the size and location of everything, > # but create new filesystems. The actual partitioning is done > # manually before executing FAI. > # > # The ordering of lines in this file is very important! > > disk_config disk1 bootable:1 preserve_always:all > always_format:5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 > primary - 0 - - > primary - 0 - - > primary - 0 - - > logical / 0 ext3 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro createopts="-c > -j" > logical swap 0 swap sw > logical /var 0 ext3 rw,relatime createopts="-m 5 > -j" > logical /tmp 0 ext3 rw createopts="-m 0 > -j" > logical /usr 0 ext3 rw,relatime createopts="-j" > logical /home 0 ext3 rw,relatime,nosuid,nodev createopts="-m 1 > -j" > logical /vm 0 ext2 rw,relatime,nosuid,nodev createopts="-m 1" > logical /wrk 0 ext3 rw,relatime,nosuid,nodev createopts="-m 1 > -j" > > > Thank you!
Geza
