> On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 13:08 -0600, Jeffrey Stolte wrote: > > > (I should mention that one of our main uses of FAI is to upgrade > > machines from one Debian release to the next. However, rather than do > > an in-place upgrade, we do a fresh install of the new release while > > preserving the existing partition sizes on the disk.) > > > > I hope this makes some sense. If no one else has asked for this > > capability, though, maybe we need to reconsider our practice of > > preserving partition sizes. I don't want you to have to add an option > > that no one else uses or that is not considered to be a "best > practice". > > Let me know if you need any additional information. Thanks. > > I would cast another vote towards adding such an option. Our use case is > the following: we have several dual-booting laptops where the Windows > partition(s), as well as the master boot record (which may contain > manufacturer-specific code to access recovery partitions, etc) should be > touched as little as possible. Just as the above user, we prefer fresh > installs to in-place upgrades. > > It would feel very reassuring if there were an option in FAI which > essentially meant "do not touch anything in disk paritioning, just > create new filesystems on existing partitions where requested, and leave > all the rest unchanged". > > In today's situation, I always feel an urge to test my setups (based on > hooks and/or manual intervention) several times on a "disposable" test > machine before I dare to run FAI on a "real" system. >
I've added an option "always_format" which can be used along with preserve_always, etc. and works the same way as the "format" option did in setup_harddisks. I believe the following should work, adapting Jeffrey's example: disk_config sda disklabel:msdos bootable:1 preserve_always:1,2,5,6,7 always_format:1,2,5 primary / 0 ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro createopts="-j" primary swap 0 swap sw logical /var 0 ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro createopts="-j" logical /home 0 ext3 defaults,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro logical /d1 0 ext3 defaults,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro In case some of the partitions need not exist in all cases, you can use preserve_lazy instead of preserve_always, but then some size other than 0 must be specified. This option is available as of 3.3.5+experimental2. For details on how to obtain the experimental builds please see http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/Main_Page#getting_FAI Testing is much appreciated!! Best, Michael
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