Drive Geometry Problems
 

Hi Folks,

I had a computer with 6 operating systems on it. These included,
XP, OBSD, Mepis, and various Knoppix systems. I tried to install
Sarge on this computer and ran into problems.

1 I have a separate swap partition for each nix system on the drive.
I told the Sarge installer to only use the swap partition I created
for it. The Sarge installer rewrote all of the swap partitions anyway.

2. The Sarge installer created partitions on my HD that had a different
drive geometry than the others. This caused Partition Magic to
issue a large number of warnings about data loss. Several systems
quit working correctly.

Is there any way to keep the Sarge installer from messing up my HD?

Peace,

John

Yes, there is. In the partition section of Debian-Installer it shows a small image like a skull and crossbones for each partition that it plans to modify. Before you give Debian-Installer the permission to modify your hard drive, make sure that only those partitions which you actually want to be modified are marked with such skull & crossbones image.

Of course, if you've already messed up your hard drive geometry with some unreliable partitioning program BEFORE you install Debian, then troubles are to be expected. Especially *BSDs are known to create problems with multiboot setups. (Try a Google search for "FreeBSD geometry bug".)