[1782] in NetBSD-Development
Disk partitioning problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Sep 9 02:22:22 1998
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 02:22:09 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
From talking to Karl, I think I mostly understand under what
conditions the install will leave the hard disk in an unbootable
state:
* When there is a preexisting NetBSD partition overlapping
with the MBR. (No known cases of this, but it will cause a
failure.)
* When there is not a valid MBR. This was probably the case
with Alexis's machine.
In the second case, fdisk will construct an MBR with a NetBSD
partition overlapping the MBR, and you're basically back in the first
case.
Although the second case isn't really expected, the install should
detect it and handle it better, or users in that situation will
experience much grief and not understand what's going on. I believe a
reasonable test is to run fdisk on the disk and grep standard error
for either "invalid fdisk partition table" or "can't read fdisk
partition table".
In the first case, it's possible that the user actually wants to use a
partition like that. Perhaps they'll be booting off of another disk,
or something. But there should be a big bright warning sign.
