Bug in bsdinstall (fs found where not present)

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 11:09 PM, Nathan Whitehorn
<nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>wrote:

> On 08/29/13 17:02, Warren Block wrote:
> > On Thu, 29 Aug 2013, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> >
> >> On 08/29/13 14:04, Warren Block wrote:
> >>>> From a 9.2-PRERELEASE snapshot, go into the shell, create a GPT disk
> >>> layout with a bunch of partitions for filesystems and swap.  Exit the
> >>> shell and run the installer.
> >>>
> >>> Go through each partition setting a mount point.  Tell bsdinstall to
> >>> continue.  It reports that the / partition has a preexisting
> >>> filesystem (it does not, in fact; this disk had a mishmash of MBR and
> >>> NTFS on it).
> >>>
> >>> Tell bsdinstall to continue anyway.  It does, and then reports that it
> >>> can't mount /dev/ada0p2 on /mnt, presumably because, contrary to the
> >>> misleading and incorrect error message, there is no filesystem on
> >>> there.
> >>>
> >>> The install fails, try again, entering all the mount points, and it
> >>> will fail the same.
> >>>
> >>> Short term solution: newfs the / partition, so there really is a
> >>> filesystem there for bsdinstall to detect and warn about.  Then it
> >>> works.
> >>
> >> bsdinstall has no way to detect whether or not you already have UFS in a
> >> freebsd-ufs file system. It assumes, when not given contrary
> >> information, that a partition that exists is initialized. There does not
> >> seem to be a way around this. If you have any ideas, those would of
> >> course be helpful.
> >
> > file(1) works well for detecting filesystems.
> >
> > For that matter, what is bsdinstall doing now that makes it say there
> > is a filesystem on a partition?  Maybe the message is misleading.
>
> What that actually means is that the partition exists. (file doesn't
> work on block devices, by the way) I'm happy to change the error
> message. The default behavior is that, like partitioners on all other
> operating systems, it treats creating partitions and running newfs as
> intimately linked activities -- similarly, that the type marked in the
> partition table is the actual filesystem type. Intermediate cases are
> very hard to detect reliably.
> -Nathan
> _______________________________________________
>
>


I am installing many different operating systems .

One of the important problems is when

"Use entire disk"

is selected , some of the installers are still searching valid partitions
on disk
and failing miserably because there does not exist any one ( because unit
is new or corrupted ) or there are some partitions , etc. remained from
another different operating system .

My opinion is that the first question should be to select an option among

"Use entire disk" or
"Use existing file systems" .

alternatives , only search valid file system(s) when "Use existing file
systems" is
selected .

When "Use entire disk" is selected , directly apply file systems creations
by just
after determining the geometry of the unit under consideration .


Thank you very much .

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk