Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 16:13, Gene Heskett wrote:

> And I'm down there working on it right now, having put a used 46GB WD 
> drive in as /dev/hdb, and the first real problem is that DD will not 
> allow me to make a /root partition, claiming it must be a directory 
> on /.
> 
> With all due respect, thats bullshit. I will NEVER partition a drive 
> and put /root as a subdir on /. 

Root's $HOME must always be available, even in single-user mode with
nothing but / mounted.

> I don't have such an arrangment in 
> place on any linux install I have, won't tolerate it.  Its senseless 
> to put your most private business as nothing more secure than a 
> directory on /.  End of discussion IMNSHO.  What I do as root, is not 
> any of the semi-public /'s business, none nada zip.

These days you'd probably do any necessary rescue work from a
bootable rescue CD anyway, but be prepared...

> So how do I proceed?

If you insist on breaking 30 years of mostly-correct tradition,
name your partition something else now, then change the mount
point in /etc/fstab after you are happy with everything else.
But, if you don't already know how to do that, I'd recommend
sticking to the defaults.  Most of them are there for a reason.
Note that you could easily mount some other partition on
a directory under /root if you want a compromise that keeps
root's login working with some dead drives and still lets you
hide whatever you want on a physically different disk.

> /dev/hda is hopefully not to be touched, this is a new install.

It won't unless you checked the box to use it, and one to
remove partitions.

> FWIW, this time on the final release of FC3, I can get a shell with 
> ctl+alt+F2, so that at least is working now.  So I'm going to use 
> that shell to format, install journalling, and label those 
> partitions, and then see if I can get around DD and actually continue 
> a fresh install on this disk.

I've never seen any issues where you select existing partitions
in DD.  All you should have to do to nail down the locations
is the fdisk step.  You can just check the option in DD to
format.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com