Well, there goes Windows!

[Kevin Oberman]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Garrett Cooper <yanegomi at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I used the bsdinstaller again on the 9.0-BETA1 media with manual
> partitioning. The HP desktop ate up 3 partitions, I inconveniently
> forgot that geom can't grok secondary PC MBR partitions, was fooling
> around and cleared the partitions, etc. I hit abort to exit the
> partitioner start and from scratch and now my Windows partitions and
> recovery partitions are gone.
>
> So, oops... just a word of warning for anyone else that monkeys around
> with bsdinstall that it doesn't always hold true to the "will apply
> changes at Exit" guarantee right now (i.e. atomicity is busted). If
> someone else has a second OS that they'd rather not lose, at least
> they will know to reboot their box when committing changes.
>
> I'll inspect the code sometime this weekend to trace down the annoying
> bug, but this is probably release gating for new users (and sadly
> forces me back to wanting to use sysinstall :/..).

Whoa! It certainly should NOT do that! I had the opposite issue of it
not touching the disk when I thought it should have. And gpart
certainly grokked my MBR setup as I installed Beta1 in an existing
slice of an MBR disk. All 3 of my windows partitions are fine and
Windows 7 boots the same as always. It certainly never tried writing
anything until I selected the poorly named "Save" option.
rogue> gpart show ada0
=>       63  625142385  ada0  MBR  (298G)
         63       1985        - free -  (992k)
       2048    2457600     1  ntfs  (1.2G)
    2459648  221272064     2  ntfs  (105G)
  223731712  368639963     3  freebsd  (175G)
  592371675         37        - free -  (18k)
  592371712   32768000     4  ntfs  (15G)
  625139712       2736        - free -  (1.3M)

I will admit that the documentation for gpart leaves out a few
details. (E.g. it fails
to even mention the NTFS or FAT32 partitions, although they are in the code.)
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer - Retired
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com