Re: [util-linux] [parted] Active partition

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi John,

I'm no longer involved with Parted, although I think the general principle
is a good idea.  Parted does have a "check" facility, but it is quite
superficial at the moment, and can't recognize many common problems.

I'm sure the new Parted maintainers would be interested in patches ;)

Cheers,
Andrew

On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 07:49:29AM +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> Andries
> Andrew
> I've been caught a couple of times on this.
> 
> We needed to rebuild a Windows SBS server to a new disk, and resize the 
> C: and D: (actually it was labelled F: but never mind) partitions.
> 
> As far as I could tell (and I tried), I could not copy C: from Windows, 
> so we ended up copying the source disk (80 Gb) with dd on Knoppix to the 
> target (bigger than 80 Gb) and mucking around with fdisk and/or cfdisk.
> 
> Once we realised there was no active partition and rectified that it 
> worked a treat, but it could have taken a _very_ long time for us to 
> realise the problem, and many folk wouldn't have.
> 
> 
> It's not always a mistake to have no active partition (eg Linux only), 
> but it often is, particularly when it's the boot drive and 
> DOS/Windows/Darwin is involved.
> 
> I suggest that the disk partitioning tools in util-linux, and parted, be 
> altered so as to warn the user when the partition table being written 
> has one or more non-linux primary partitions and none of them is marked 
> active.
> 
> What do you think?
>