On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:50 PM, Cyril Brulebois <k...@debian.org> wrote:

> Nicholas D Steeves <nstee...@gmail.com> (2017-11-10):
> > 1) get a list of disks
> > 2) identify the disk used by the installer
> > 3) exclude the disk found at #2
>
> How do you do 2?
>
> Last I touched this, nothing obvious appeared in d-i to know what the
> installer was booted from. ISTR having suggested at the time that
> bootloaders could set something to help d-i figure out where it booted
> from, but I don't think anything happened in this area since then.
>
>
OK, This Is a crazy Idea, but . . . When generating Installer images, they
get various readmes and so on, and I believe one of them includes version
information, so we can parse that file for the version number, compare it
with the one in the initrd (to be added). This handles the common cases of
cd (overkill as cds are read only) and USB (presumably most important), but
fails on net-install (where it is not needed). We can have installer loader
scripts copy the version info file to mark the drives they are using which
should catch most of the rest of the cases.

A variation of this is to have a pseudo random token in the version file
which is passed on the command-line to the installer instead of modifying
the initrd. This has the advantage that we could have special case values
for net-boot to skip the scan. (ie if the token was a hexadecimal value but
the special case was the word netboot.

both cases make identifying and protecting partitions used to store
archives and iso images easy by manually placing the version file.

> 4) present modified list as target disks for installation
> > 5) unless in expert mode, where a user could use one partition of a
> > disk as the installation source and another partition as the
> > installation target.  I'm not sure how important #5 is, but maybe some
> > users want to be able to do this?
>
>
> KiBi.
>



-- 
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Ben Hildred
Automation Support Services

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