Subject: What to do with dedicated partitions ?
To: None <tech-install@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu>
From: Bernd Wiserner <wiserner@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>
List: tech-install
Date: 11/06/1993 00:13:13
Hi all,
as you might know I started to hack on the install-procedures .
I want to hear your opinion on this:
Untill now diklabel made a dedicated partition on the disk,if
the disk-geometry wasn't known,or was in a way the BIOS couldn't eat.
I don't want to create such partitions anymore. I have some ideas,
how disklabel could be convinced to not do such a thing.
The question is : 
Should one be alowed to keep his dedicated partition at a new install,
or should it be converted to a non-dedicated-partition.
This would work but the first (BSD)partition ('a') would be wiped out.

CONS for keeping it :
	- the dos-fdisk shows that only something about 25Mb are occupied on the
	  disk, and you can create a dos-partition which supersedes the
	  BSD-partition.

PRO
	- some peaople have only a 'a' partition,and have some valuable data
	  on it. If I change the partition to non-dedicated,this data are lost.

So what should be done ?
thanks,
MfG
B.Wiserner

P.S. I have sent this also to freebsd-hackers, so if you read it
already ,please excuse this second message.




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