[Dragora-users] dragora-installer: Partition detection issues

[Michael Siegel]

Hello,

after discussing some problems with storage device detection in
dragora-installer on IRC yesterday, I have now done a couple of more tests.

The first thing I found is that it is apparently not a good idea to use
the first partition of the hard drive as the swap partition and then
have the root partition come second, e.g.:

  root@dragora:~ # fdisk -l | grep ^/dev/sd
  /dev/sda1          2048   2099199   2097152    1G 82 Linux swap /
  Solaris
  /dev/sda2  *    2099200 156301487 154202288 73.5G 83 Linux

When you do that, running dragora-installer will fail:

  root@dragora:~ # dragora-installer
      Linux partitions were not detected.

  A Linux partition is required to continue the installation.  You can
  use utilities such as fdisk(8), cfdisk(8) or parted(8) to create at
  least one Linux partition.  Then run `dragora-installer' again.

  ^ Return status = 1

So, I simply turned that partition layout around to make things work.
I'm not exactly sure if other Linux distributions do allow for swap to
come first, but I'm inclined to think they do. Anyway, this is not a big
deal.

Then, I chose to do an Expert-mode installation because I was curious to
see what the different software series contain. I also threw out a few
packages while going through the lists, but carefully. However, this all
ended in getting a barrage of syntax errors for grep. So, I chose to
start over and re-ran dragora-installer.

Now, dragora-installer did detect my swap partition (on /dev/sda2) when
I re-ran it, but: When I chose “Ignore & Continue” in the swap setup
dialog, the installer lost track of it and didn't show it when
displaying fstab later. Simply adding the missing entry manually and
then continuing the installation worked, however.

On the other hand, when I chose “Format” instead of “Ignore & Continue”,
the installer informed me that the swap partition is formatted and
active already and that it would therefore not do anything with it. But:
Choosing “Format” also led to the swap partition being included in the
fstab shown later.

Hope that helps.


Best
--msi