Ibnstall Eats Swap Partitions On Non-Installation Drives

[Dan Goodes]

Bob,

I agree with you - i can't think of any reson you'd *want* your new distro 
to use the swap partitions for the old distro... but I also don't see what 
the problem is. 

o Any and all swap partitions you have defined will be initialised and
mounted by whatever distro you're running, at boot time anyway... You wont
be saving data to a swap partition for use later, so formatting them as
part of the install wont be a problem.

o The fact is that the installer wants to give the system the maximum 
amount of swap space, by using any swap partitions it finds. I don't see 
why that would be a problem. It's perfectly reasonable for you to disable 
access to that swap partition after boot.

o The format for a swap partition is the same accross the board. IMHO, I 
think any changes to the format for linux swap would be made in the 
kernel, and would affect all distros at the same time. So there wont be 
any major problem with one distro formatting another distros swap 
partition.

-dan

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Robert L Cochran wrote:

> This is an issue I've brought up before: if you have 2 Linux distros on 
> 2 separate drives, the Fedora Core installer will honor your choice of 
> which drive to install to, but it will format and then use the swap 
> partition on the drive(s) you are not installing to.
> 
> I have been told there are "legitimate reasons" for destroying the swap 
> partition that belongs to another distro, but no one on the forums has 
> given me a list of those "legitimate reasons". I fail to see any 
> legitimacy to it whatsoever. There is just not a good reason. Anaconda 
> ought to be changed to stop this behaviour, and also it should not 
> attempt to add swap partitions from other distros to /etc/fstab.
> 
> *If you don't want the swap partitions on other hard drives wiped out 
> when you install Fedora Core, be very careful to review the drive 
> partitioning and check the 'preserve data' option that Disk Druid 
> displays. And then before booting your new system, find some way to edit 
> /etc/fstab to prevent those partitions from being mounted.
> 
> 

-- 
Regards,

Dan Goodes  :  Systems Programmer  :  dang at planetmirror.com

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