Can't change partition table anymore

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <4251783B.400 at centtech.com>, Eric Anderson writes:
>
>So, I went in to sysinstall, and attempted to blast my old Windows
>partition from my drive. 

Whoever tried to make sysinstall a system management tool didn't
complete the work.

The "correct" tool for the task is fdisk(8) which I am quite
certain will do the right thing.

Now, I put "correct" in quotes because I am fully aware that despite
all its deficiencies sysinstalls UI is much better than fdisks.


Somebody who reads the above part of this email carefully, they can
find at least three things to work on in the above message, but to
avoid any transmission loss on this message, I will spell it out
very clearly:

1.  Improve on sysinstall to do more of the right thing when used
    on a running system.

2.  Improve the userinterface of fdisk.

3.  Improve the userinterface of sysinstall.


Please notice that these are all pretty easy tasks to perform, it
is merely a matter of userland programming there is no kernel
magic.  (You probably will need a test-machine though, but
a soekris can be had for roughly USD200 and is perfect for this
kind of task so I don't accept that as an excuse).


Poul-Henning

PS:
And yes, I think improving sysinstall is worthwhile because there
is no credible replacement in sight anywhere that I can see.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.