[ltp] pre-installation advice?

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Dan Borello wrote:
> I used a bootable linux cd to create the partition table that i wanted. 
> This hosed Windows XP as expected.  

It depends what software you use for repartitioning. If you used fdisk or
cfdisk without using ntfsresize or fips for FAT then yes, it's expected,
actually it's guaranteed your data will be hosed.

If you used Parted, QTParted, DiskDrake, YAST, etc then your data is
expected to remain consistent during repartitioning.

However the partition table might become incorrect from Windows point of
view in certain, rare cases due to Parted bugs. The boot problem and the
shifted partition caused by these bugs are recoverable without any data
loss and the fix is being worked on currently.

The problem seems to be is that, Parted relied on the kernel to provide
the correct logical disk geometry to fill certain parts of the partition
table, needed for some bootloaders. Kernels before version 2.6 usually
guessed the needed geometry right. 2.6 kernels don't guess this geometry
anymore thus they broke Parted and basically all tools that relied on the
kernel to provide this information.

The 2.6 kernels caused also other, smaller problems for Parted and these
hid the more serious ones. When the FSF (Free Software Foundation) site
was compromised last year then it took about half year to recover. During
that time there weren't new Parted releases for the minor problems because
it was impossible to upload/release anything. At the same time kernel 2.6
was released and distros started to ship it with Parted. Parted is used
with 2.6 kernels, a combination that wasn't and couldn't be soundly tested
in a lot of different user environments.

Note, the Parted partitioning problem happens only rarely, although
considering millions of users that can be a significant number and of
course it needs to be fixed ASAP.

	Szaka