[ale] Going Debian; partman question

[Jason Lunz]

rslau at mindspring.com said:
> I'm getting ready to upgrade my 2.0-kernel Mandrake 7.1 based system to Debian 

2.0? really? you have a conservative approach to upgrading!

> Sarge 3.1r1, and I have a question about partman's (the partitioner and disk 
> formatter). I have some existing ext2 partitions I want to wipe and convert to 
> ext3, but two ext2's I want to leave alone (they're holding the backups of my 
> home directory and the old contents of /etc with all the old configuration 
> information). I can't find any reference in the Debian Install documentation 
> how much control on whether a partition get formatted or not.
>
> Can anyone here answer this for me?

The debian installer definitely gives you that level of control. You can
copy partitions in the installer, or build raid arrays out of them,
format them, leave them blank, whatever.

I find the best way to answer questions about a new distro installer is
to try it out a few times on a blank vmware machine.

> Anything else I should know about? Should I be worried about my NC100 ethernet 
> card?

I doubt it. That's not ISA, is it? I recommend using a PCI nic if so;
you can get them used for $5-$10 that should work just fine.

> /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat user,exec,umask=0 0 0
> /dev/hda2 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hda5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
> /dev/hda6 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hda7 /usr ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hda8 swap swap defaults 0 0
> /dev/hda9 /music ext2 exec,dev,suid,rw 1 2
>
> /dev/hdb1 /storage1 ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hdb5 /storage2 ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hdb6 /storage3 ext2 defaults 1 2
> /dev/hdb7 /storage4 ext2 defaults 1 2

did you know you can safely convert all these ext2 partitions to ext3 in
place? For example, "tune2fs -j /dev/hdb7". It's even safe to do this if
the filesystem is mounted.

That way they'll be more resilient to power failures. I'd wait until
after your upgrade, though, so you're using a more recent tune2fs.

Jason