Caution, SuSE Linux Live Eval loading

[Kurt Granroth]

On Wednesday 19 September 2001 05:18 pm, Richard L. Proctor wrote:
> Brian, SuSE will try and use all the remaining space on that drive that
> Windows wasn't using.  Windows 2000 will also do the same thing.  It's
> normal.  You can remove SuSE and expand the partition back out.

[Hopefully this gets through]

This isn't true, btw.  Brian was referring to the LiveEval CD-ROMs.  These 
have a distribution of SuSE that runs off of the CD.. it does NOT do any 
repartitioning at all.

For the curious, this is the basic procedure it follows (roughly):

1. Run 'fdisk -l' to discover the partitions.  The first DOS one is tagged 
the C: drive
2. The size of the C: partition is checked to make sure there is enough room 
for the temp files.  If there isn't (or if there is no C: drive), then it 
will still run but no settings will be saved.
3. The C: drive is mounted and two files are 'dd if=/dev/zero'ed.
4. The first file is mkswap'ed into a swap file and the second is mke2fs'ed 
into a filesystem (containing /home, mostly)
5. On bootup, the filesystem is mounted with the loopback option

That's it.  No repartitioning at all.  As long as the hard drive itself is 
viable (no corrupted filesystem or partition table), there is no chance of 
the LiveEval doing any damage.

BTW, if you read between the lines, that means that you have to make 
absolutely sure that the partition table is accurate.  If you are running 
software RAID on Windows, it will *not* be accurate and Linux will think that 
the partitions are larger or smaller than they really are.  The LiveEval in 
this case won't hose your disk, but weird things can still happen.
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop