[ On Wednesday, December 1, 2004 at 13:37:16 (-0800), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: sysinst problems
>
> Outside of the fact that it used to work this way because of much less
> malleable disklabels, how about the ability to pre-partition a disk for
> different uses at different times?

If you want to repartition the disk for different uses then fine,
repartition it -- properly and uniquely each and every time.

Don't try to use latent information in the same label as your memory for
each of your partitioning options -- keep separate notes!  Since the
output of disklabel can serve as its input it should be really easy to
keep separate labels for different uses each in their own text file on
some other disk that you're not re-partitioning, perhaps along with some
documenting notes to remind you of how you use each scheme.

Or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to do?  It seems to me
you're just being lazy and trying to avoid the most simple little
"disklabel" step when you change how you use a disk.

As far as I can see there should not ever be any need for overlapping
partitions (other than a whole-disk partition like 'c', and 'd' on i386)
to ever co-exist at the same time during any given specific use of the
disk -- and you can re-partition it at any time to your heart's content,
but keep each partitioning scheme in a separate off-disk label.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>