[ On Monday, December 6, 2004 at 01:14:18 (-0500), der Mouse wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: sysinst problems
>
> If it really is possible to use "upgrade" to install onto a blank disk
> that is labeled and partitioned but not otherwise set up - and in
> particular without any version of NetBSD installed on it - that should
> be made clearer.  Certainly the word "upgrade" implies the presence of
> an earlier version which is to be upgraded.

Well, you'd have to manually newfs the partitions you wanted to use and
put a valid etc/fstab in the "a" partition first....

> So I used "install" and it took my existing label as a starting point
> for the partitioning step, which was good, but wouldn't let me use it
> unchanged, which was bad.

No, that was a "Good Thing", a very good thing, and presumably by design.

If you want to duplicate someone else's setup then you need to do so
100%, no?  (in theory at least...)

OK, now that I'm clear in exactly what you were trying to do I can
perhaps point out one more way to look at this issue.

There are, as you've discovered, sanity checks in sysinst that define a
proper complete and non-crufty partition table.  Those checks did their
job and detected crufty junk in your existing label -- they cannot tell
at the time they must be executed whether or not the /etc/fstab
contained within the "a" partition might specify filesystems on
overlapping partitions.

I.e. those sanity checks really cannot ever be safely turned off.  If
you want to be the expert and tell the kernel that the cruft is OK as
you won't cause any of it to come into play and cause problems then be
the expert and don't use sysinst.


However if you want to test sysinst and still save your old partition
table then save it somewhere else -- don't try to merge it with the new
one you're going to test and please especially don't ask that sysinst to
even have a non-default hidden option to allow you to use it to create
the merged label.  That's a very bogus requirement, for _sysinst_!

Now of course if you use the "install to disk" option you're also going
to tell sysinst what partitions to newfs and to mount and install to,
and presumably it could later figure out that it would be OK to leave
the overlapping parititons in place but as I keep saying that's just an
accident waiting to happen.  However from a "Good Housekeeping"
perspective the in-use partition table should only contain the in-use
partitions, and it should never include overlapping paritions since they
cause the device driver to set up device nodes that, if accessed, would
conflict with other device nodes and at that point the system cannot
prevent an accident -- it has given you the rope and it expects you to
hang it and/or yourself.  :-)  You can play around and experiment with
such configurations if you're willing to take the risks, but "sysinst"
isn't intended to facilitate such risks -- it's designed to mitigate
them and to reliably create a working, safe, and secure, install.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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