Automatic partitioning questions

[Roman Daszczyszak]

> 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.

I welcome any help I can get. :)

>> 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?

Two configurations:
1) 1x 160GB primary drive, 1x 1TB secondary drive
2) 1x 300GB primary drive, 1x 1TB secondary drive

For testing, I've been using a workstation with the 160GB drive, as I
figure if it works on that one, it will work on the others.

<snip>
>> 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.

Will do

<snip>
>> 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.

They seem to be missing from the alternate 12.04.2 CD, which is what
I'm basing this off of.

>
> 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.

It uses partman, which doesn't seem to support what I want.

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

Interesting idea, though seems much more work just to make
partitioning work properly. Maybe as a last resort? :)

Thank you for the response!
-Roman