Package: lilo Version: 1:22.6.1-6.2 Severity: important Hi,
It seems that the default behavior of lilo, at least in Sarge, is to hide FAT32 and NTFS partitions from Windows (by adding 0x10 to the partition type number in the partition table) on every reboot, other than those deliberately referenced in an "other=/dev/<foo>" statement. (If this has changed in Sid, please close this bug.) Apparently this was first made the default in lilo 21.6. Certainly the ability to hide partitions is useful, and if someone is looking for information about it, they will come across the description of the "change" keyword in lilo documentation. However, to do it by default is unexpected and highly frustrating behavior to someone who isn't specifically aware of it. Who would expect a boot loader to futz with the partition table??? Since I had no idea that lilo was at fault, I only tried searching for keywords like "windows xp healthy (unknown partition)", and it took several hours before I found a link to a no-longer existing page at SUSE's old website (finally obtained a copy via archive.org) explaining that lilo was at fault. Proof that I'm not the only one confused by this: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/04/msg02926.html http://groups.google.com/group/alt.os.linux.mandrake/browse_thread/thread/c871b4e809345323/e5ceed373cc18050 http://groups.google.com/group/alt.os.linux.mandrake/browse_thread/thread/d491574a03589c2c/5a020bf55169bcb6 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/browse_thread/thread/f297367f5123c858/3d80cf0d27d6bb39 The old SUSE web page stated that the behavior of lilo in future versions of SUSE would be changed not to hide partitions by default. I highly encourage you to do the same with the Debian package if this is not already the case in Sid. I think it's likely that the number of people using a spare FAT32 partition to share files between Win/Linux is greater than the number who want to boot into several different Windows operating systems using Lilo. On the bright side, this annoyance did finally convince me to make the switch to Grub. -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-3-mppe Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Versions of packages lilo depends on: ii debconf 1.4.30.13 Debian configuration management sy ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22sarge3 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an pn libdevmapper1.01 Not found. regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
