On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 05:44:40PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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: > > > > > 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.
> > > > 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. > > 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. > Hi hendrik I would have called it a bug in the installer and submitted it. It would end up on debian-boot where a trustworthy reply should have been available. If you have a chance, make a current daily-build netinst.iso an see if the problem still exists. If it doesn, file a bug. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
