On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:50:27AM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 08:03:02AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 12:57:09AM -0500, Kevin Mark wrote: > > > On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 08:40:02PM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > > > > > > wouldn't consider a *N*X are doing so. And they're not prepared. > > > > > > > > > > so in other words... its a good thing! > > > > > > > > > > > > > Yes. It tells us that our documentation isn't up to their needs. > > > > > > > > Doug. > > > Well, I'd say that the value of 'their' has progressively been changing > > > to be an ever more less expeirenced group of users. > > > > Well, I've been using Linux for five years -- at least -- I've lost > > count -- with various distros (starting frome when slackware was just > > starting to be installed from CDROM instead of floppies), have settled > > on Debian, and are tempted by Gentoo. I don't find the documentation up > > to *my* needs. Or else maybe I stil don't know where to find it. > > > > For example, where do you find details on why rescue mode, swapped hard > > drives (/dev/hda <-> /dev/hdc) when I asked it to start a shell in the > > context of my root partition but not when I asked it to start a shell in > > the installer context? In fact running fdisk /dev/hda in the root > > context showed me a perfect partition table for /dev/hdc, except that > > all the partitions were labelled as being on /dev/hda. > > > > Now I know the boot-loaders have provisions for swapping hard-drive > > letters. But why were they invoked? > > > > This is the kind of detail that needs to be documented. And access to > > wource code is no longer a solution, even for experienced programmers -- > > there's just too much undocumented context for each piece of the > > hundred-million-odd lines of code that constitute Debian that that's > > only practical for specialists in the particular subsystem under > > investigation. > > > > I've considered switching to Gentoo, because some of their advocates say > > their distribution is strong on documentation, but I suspect that they > > mey not be a lot better. > > Do you need to know the _why_ of that, or would you have liked a > heads-up and what to do about it?
I needed to know what to do about it. Not knowing the why, I decided I couldn't trust the rescue system and improvised a workaround that involved installing a new Debian system on a spare partition on /dev/hda2 (fortunately I still had some space) and using *its* lilo to establish bootability of /dev/hdc3. > The _why_ may be a complicated technical answer usable only to those > working on coding the installer (or the kernel). The > what-to-do-about-it should be simple for someone who has dealt with it > to explain. I know that Debian has ways of futzing the BIOS so that drive letters are different from the standard ones. What I don't know is why it decided to do this as a rescue attempt. My lack of understanding made the rescue system untrustable, hence unusable. And I'm not at all sure that posting the details on, say, debian-user would have resulted in an answer sufficiently authoritative to be trustworthy. -- hendrik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
