Re: [9fans] non-standard installs

["Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

> 	I'm sure I'm just unlucky, but given my (recent) experience
> of installing Plan 9 for the first time, I'd stay well away from your
> "production" machine, even if it did have a clean partition.
> 
> I found (repeatedly) that trying to put Plan 9 into a clean
> secondary partition corrupted the size of the enclosing primary
> partition. I was able to put it back, but thankfully the whole 40Gb
> was brand new at the time, and so this wasn't necessary (except as a
> vain attempt to keep the other partitions as the shop had left them).
> Thus, I eventually scrapped the whole partition table, and put Plan 9
> into a primary partition.
> Since then it's all gone fine.....

There were some serious bugs in the handling of secondary
partitions.  They're fixed in the fdisk on the current boot disk,
as of January 13, 2002.  As someone else mentioned, Plan 9 has to be in a 
primary partition, so that bootstrap loaders can find it
(unlike, say, Linux swap, which has no right to be in a 
valuable primary partition, but I digress).

Russ