Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 14 Jan 1999 17:48:58 -0500 (EST) | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: (un)corrupted ext2 partitions |
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Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 21:08:29 +0100 From: Marc Espie <espie@quatramaran.ens.fr>
What I also don't know is what should be done when you get an incoherent view of the disk. Trust the linux-side ? Sounded like the simplest way to do things... I don't see how panicing at such an early point would help, for instance.
Panic'ing certainly doesn't help, but printing huge amounts of warnings is definitely in order. :-)
The rc scripts might also want to be rewritten to test for this case and avoid mounting things read-write if there's known conflicts in partition table.
If you want to play safe, all decent OSes documentations recommend to use their own fdisk-like program to edit the area of the disk they're concerned about: use linux's fdisk for linux partitions; use OpenBSD's fdisk for OpenBSD partitions.
That's sensible advice: as much as it would be convenient to have one single program that would deal with all partitioning schemes, it is a maintenance nightmare. Who would like to be in charge of synching linux/netbsd/ freebsd/openbsd fdisk so that it keeps in tune with all those OSes...
True, but all of the fdisk-like programs have to allocate from the same free space, so there has to be at least a certain amount of syncing between the multiple OS partition labels.
It's basically a hard problem.
- Ted
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