Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 23:12:37 +0100 (BST)
From: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk>
To: doconnor@gsoft.com.au ("Daniel O'Connor"), Jason Noble <jnoble@perlwizard.org>
Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Getting PXE to leave an existing partition alone
Message-ID: <200207042212.g64MCbsX004153@dotar.thuvia.org>
In-Reply-To: "Daniel O'Connor"'s message of Jun 8, 6:00am
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> From: doconnor@gsoft.com.au ("Daniel O'Connor")
> Date: Sat 8 Jun, 2002
> Subject: Re: Getting PXE to leave an existing partition alone
> On Sat, 2002-06-08 at 06:26, Jason Noble wrote:
> > /virtual partition line and it will not newfs the drive. The following
> > line does not work (i.e. all the data on /virtual goes bye bye):
> >
> > mlxd0s1-5=ufs 0 /virtual N
> >
> > Has anyone used pxe to upgrade a system and leave one or more existing
> > FreeBSD partitions alone? How should I go about this?
>
> I had a quick look through the code and it seems you need to specify
> soft-update-ness if you want to also specify newfs'ing or not.
>
> eg try..
> mlxd00s1-5=ufs /virtual 1 N
>
> See line 1378 of label.c in src/release/sysinstall.
>
> Hope that helps :)
That's not right.
The entry:
mlxd0s1-5=ufs 0 /virtual N
means create the /virtual partition out of remaining free space, without
soft updates ("N" == 0, that optional field's supposed to be "0" or "1").
I've just had to go read that code, and it seems that sysinstall doesn't
actually seem to do anything much sensible when using partition=existing!
It seems like it'll only work if the partition exists and has no disk label
(allowing you to create new partitions). Someone tell me if if I'm missing
something.
I'm surprised that Jason actually got it to zap /virtual. My problemn
(under 4.6) is that because the slice was previously labelled, sysinstall
bombs out because there's no free space to (re-)create any of the partitions...
This is a bummer. Is there really no way to re-install on an existing slice
using a sysinstall script? In my case I don't even mind if it does zap the
disklabel and create a new one, but it would be nice if there was a way just
to tell it to re-use the existing one, e.g. extending the syntax to something
like:
mlxd0s1-5=/virtual Y
similar to the way you can mount the DOS slice, or:
mlxd0s1-5=ufs N /virtual
whichever code path comes out easiest...
Cheers,
Mark.
--
Mark Valentine, Thuvia Labs <mark@thuvia.co.uk> <http://www.thuvia.co.uk>;
"Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." Mark Valentine uses
"We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* and endorses FreeBSD
-- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com>; <http://www.freebsd.org>;
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