[ubuntu-za] A modest proposal for eliminating the inevitable partition failure issue with Ubuntu conversions

[David Robert Lewis]

Lee Sharp wrote:
> David Robert Lewis wrote:
>
>   
>> Did you convert completely, or partition? Also, the Ubuntu duel boot 
>> option assumes you're not going to do something crazy like partition a 
>> third disk with HFS and that you're not going to try to install anything 
>> else like SuZe. I went the partitioning root, learnt my lesson, sort of. 
>> Then I got into VMS, but got caught by the Macintel bug, sad to say. 
>> Now, I'm upgrading to VMware server, and sticking with one basic OS.
>>     
>
>
> Partitions are just a bad concept.  This is not a Linux thing...  These 
> problems happen on Windows as well.  I remember the same kind of posts 
> back when people were dual booting Win95 and NT, and the NTloader would 
> flame out.  The fact is that if you try and have more than 4 partitions, 
> things go bad fast.  If you do not understand how to reinstall your 
> bootloader (fdisk /mbr, super grub disk...  etc.) things can get ugly 
> fast.  If you try and use the same bootloader for 2 different systems, 
> (Ubuntu grub and suse grub) things get ugly fast.  If you want to run a 
> lot of OSes, you either need multiple disk drives, or VM ware, or a lot 
> of patients.
>
> 			Lee
>
>   
Yes, but journaled file systems like ext3 are particularly vulnerable. I 
think what I'm trying to get at, is aside from the foolishness and 
frenzy that partition failure brings, is some method of encouraging the 
community to backup up MBR records in a way that is no going to simply 
reproduce the problem. Trolling through a host of posts on corrupted 
superblocks caused by the Ubuntu vs XP vs Mac issue, my heart goes out 
to everyone, like me, who ended up duel or triple booting, and there has 
got to be a better way then simply expecting everyone to deploy RAID and 
to backup data. We can't all afford the kind of bandwidth and hardware 
needed to do this, but surely we can make it possible to upload vital 
parts of the system in a way that makers users identify with the 
positive aspects of converting to Ubuntu, as opposed to the negative 
aspects. I just don't want to be part of a community that looks the 
other way when people wipe out. Its terrifying to see what some people 
have done, and I consider myself lucky, I had most of my data on an NTFS 
partition.

Happy Easter, everyone, back on track.

DRL