Automatic partitioning questions

[Carl Karsten]

Hey Roman,

Don't get your hopes up.. I am not a dev, just a user like yourself,
and I haven't done much with partitioning in over 3 years.  but maybe
better than nothing.

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Roman Daszczyszak <romandas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not sure if this is the right mailing list, so if there is somewhere
> better to send this to, please let me know. I’ve been trying to
> automate an Ubuntu 12.04 unattended installation and cannot seem to
> get exactly what I’m after with regards to partitioning. I’ve tried
> several different ways using Kickstart, a preseed file, and some
> combination of both, to no avail.
>
> The partitioning scheme in question involves a bunch of workstations
> with two drives, one larger than the other.

How consistent across workstations?

Like are they all 100g, 500g?

or some like that and some 250g,1t

or each one pretty much different?


> I realized early on that
> there seems to be no support for automatically partitioning a second
> drive, so my first question is: Is there going to be support for
> partitioning a second or multiple drives via debian-installer in
> future Ubuntu releases?
>
> The partitioning scheme I want is fairly simple, but a key piece of it
> is that the first (smaller) drive has a (vfat) utility partition on it
> that needs to stay and while Kickstart will allow me the option of
> wiping all the Linux partitions, it seems to be confused by the second
> disk and still asks me which partitioning method to use (Guided or
> Manual) and doesn’t partition the drive. I tried preseeding the option
> indicated in the debug log  (init_automatically_partition) using
> ‘biggest_free’ but that just seems to land me in an infinite loop
> instead of actually partitioning /dev/sda.

File a bug report.

> My question for this is:
> What is the timing of Kickstart options versus preseed options? Is
> there some precedence I’m missing? Is there a bug with using Kickstart
> and having two drives?
>
> Next, since I couldn’t get Kickstart to do what I needed, I tried just
> using a preseed file but there’s no option for leaving any existing
> partitions intact within the partman-auto options. Is there any plan
> to allow for this in the future? Does it require something upstream
> from Debian?
>
> Lastly, I thought I might just work around this problem by using
> early_command and late_command, but apparently fdisk and sfdisk are
> not on the Alternate install CD any more. Is there any way these can
> be put back on?
>

Not sure about the alt cd - I pxe boot the net installer.  I just checked,
fdisk and sfdisk are available.

details on my pxe setup:
https://github.com/CarlFK/veyepar/tree/master/setup/pxe

if the alt disk partitions disks, there has to be something.

pretty sure this is a bad path, but you can also install stuff at
install time - like I do:

anna-install openssh-server-udeb



> Any assistance or advice would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.
> -Roman
>
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-- 
Carl K