Theodore Tso wrote: > On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 07:54:14PM +0200, Rene Herman wrote: > > sfdisk -d already works most of the time. Not as a verbatim tool (I > > actually semi-frequently use a "sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk" invocation > > as a way to _rewrite_ the CHS fields to other values after changing > > machines around on a disk) but something you'd backup on the FS level > > should, in my opinion, need to be less fragile than would be possible > > with just 512 bytes available. > > *IF* you remember to store the sfdisk -d somewhere useful. In my "How > To Recover From Hard Drive Catastrophies" classes, I tell them to > print out a copy of "sfdisk -l /dev/hda ; sfdisk -d /dev/hda" and tape > it to the side of the computer. I also tell them do regular backups. > What to make a guess how many them actually follow this good advice? > Far fewer than I would like, I suspect... > > What I'm suggesting is the equivalent of sfdisk -d, except we'd be > doing it automatically without requiring the user to take any kind of > explicit action. Is it perfect? No, although the edge conditions are > quite rare these days and generally involve users using legacy systems > and/or doing Weird Shit such that They Really Should Know To Do Their > Own Explicit Backups. But for the novice users, it should work Just > Fine. Sounds great, but it may be advisable to hook this into the partition modification routines instead of mkfs/fsck. Which would mean that the partition manager could ask the kernel to instruct its fs subsystem to update the backup partition table for each known fs-type that supports such a feature. Thanks! -- Al - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
