On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 00:54, Brian Long wrote: > Only drives recently from the factory need --initlabel. Just use > clearpart --linux without --initlabel and it will wax your linux > partitions and keep VFAT intact. OK, that solved one part of the problem. It works the way you said. ISO installation images are used from the local VFAT disk, and after installation local data is restored from the local VFAT disk as well. Wondeful. Personally, I think it is a little bit strange - anaconda should only use the --initlabel option when it would ask the installing user whether it is OK to initialize the disk, not in general. But if I complain too loadly, I will just be asked to file a bug report and prepare a patch, so I'll just zip it. In both cases when --initlabel is needed (either after installing a factory-new disk or after wiping a disk with DataEraser or similar tools), a sysadmin is probably at the station anyway, so it will be acceptable to answer anaconda's question about initializing a hard disk with human intervention. However, now that anaconda thankfully does not format my VFAT partition anymore, the other problem still persists: it complains about an incorrect partition. Here human intervention is needed to tell anaconda to ignore it, but it is not acceptable in this case as I am setting up the whole thing to perform remote installations of running servers. So it must be completely automatic. The warning message from anaconda reads: -quote- Unable to align partition properly. This probably means another partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it did not have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore, but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some bootloaders. -unquote- I have extended my script from the original posting to: ... ... # clear partition tables dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb count=20 # create single VFAT partition spanning whole disk /sbin/sfdisk /dev/hdb << EOF ,,b,* ; ; ; EOF # do something DOSsy to first partition dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb1 bs=512 count=20 # format partition to VFAT32 /sbin/mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hdb1 ... ... But it still does not work. Everything beyond that in the man pages goes beyond my comprehension. So can anybody tell me what I am doing wrong to create a single VFAT 32 partition spanning the whole hard drive? -- Sincerely, K.K. Alice S. Christians
