Newbie Read: A Diskdrake Experience

[iphitus]

This is a message to all newbies or who it may concern.

If you don't know how to fix lilo/grub or edit your fstab or do things at a commandline don't use disk drake. If you do use it BACK UP!!!!!

I used diskdrake earlier to shrink a partition from 2.8gb to 2.ogb. Then with the space made it created a /home partition. It also moved my current /home directory there.

However in the process of doing this, the partition numbers were changed. /dev/hda5 became /dev/hda6 etc.

Diskdrake didn't update Lilo for these changes so Lilo refused to boot to linux or anything. THis was fixed by editing lilo.conf and restoring it.

When i booted it hadn't updated my /etc/fstab so that needed to be fixed as well.

 

And to top things off when i finally booted my system it hadn't properly created the /home partition so the data that had been moved there had been lost. Luckily it wasn't anything important. I can download it all. My LFS is also fine.

 

DISKDRAKE IS LIKE A DRUNK WITH A FLAMETHROWER

 

Anyway, i've let off enough steam. All is fine now.

James

 

edited by Ixthusdan

[SoulSe]

Wha...?

 

Dude, if you resize anything except a FAT32 partition then it is YOU who should be labelled the drunken flamethrower.

 

What would you like the n00bs to use? fdisk!?!

 

- Trying to be humourous, not flaming :wink: -

 

Anyway, I always learn something when i wreck my system, forced learning is the most effective :P

 

I do hate the way it constantly renumbers partitions, but a quick

# vim lilo.conf

Reshuffle and

lilo -v

Doesn't seem too bad.

[tyme]

- Trying to be humourous, not flaming  :wink:  -

you had my mod sensors goin' off thar boy! people should learn to do this ;-)

 

James: Diskdrake isn't made to update LILO, but I'm sure you could do it through Mandrake Control Center-> Boot -> Boot Options

 

it should have updated /etc/fstab, and if the bastard didn't, then i suggest we take a sledgehammer to it.

 

the fact of the matter is, if you don't know exactly what you're doing you shouldn't use diskdrake-as even the simplest thing could become fubar-and always backup! ;-)

[Gowator]

I know I go on about this but a lot of the Mandrake tools really suck...

Not all the time, just when they don't work :wink:

 

I wouldn't consider using diskdrake after the mess it made of writing my partition table in my first upgrade from 9.0. But as i posted to rcxau just last week .... ANY TIME YOU MODIFY THE PARTITION TABLE BE PREPARED!

 

Apart from faulty programming powercuts, family pets brushing power cables and even rampaging mad bulls that somehow end up in your bedroom at an inconvenient time can all be dangerous whilst your writing a partition table. I have yet to experience the latter and I live on the 4th floor but it wouldn't surprise me too much. Remember what can go wrong will go wrong .... usually at the most in-opportune time.

 

 

Back to DiskDrake ... yes I believe its flawed ... I now suspect it failed becuase I had an unformatted CF card in a reader during the install.

 

But generally I found the Mandrake wizards ... lacking in the recovery part when they do fail . Hence the I don't want PPP I want LAN but it won't let me change it now. They also don't come with the same instructions ... well i haven't seen them compared to fdisk or cfdisk.

 

Ultimately, if it fails and your using the wizard becuase you don't understand fdisk/ip/ifconfig/...... then your chance of recovery is pretty slim. Conversly, if you start out by HAVING to read the man pages and you mess up you have a good idea why and how to recover.

 

It seems a stupid thing to say, but I'll say it anyway ...

I feel the wizards are good for 'experienced' users who

 

want to save time but know how to sort out the mess if they fail.

 

I agree with SoulSe that you leanr something everytime you break something but a few health warnings and links to HOW-TO's and man pages 'should this go wrong' might no go amiss.

 

Again, as tyme points out ...

You can fix it through boot options ..... SO WHY NOT TELL YOU THIS...

but ultimately, you end up in vi and lilo.conf becuase you know exactly what your doing not having it hidden behind the GUI.

 

Just my 2c

[Ixthusdan]

I have successfully used diskdrake many times. I have also had some disasters. Anytime you work with data, I don't care what kind of tools you have, you must have an alternative emergency plan, or be willing to start from scratch. I don't think that is diskdrake; I think that is computers! :wink:

[Gowator]

Hey Ixthusdan,

That is what i shouted in caps.

 

I think the point I was tryng to make as well as that was the Mandrake tools often leave you in limbo compared to a CLI option. Sure you spend a lot of time actually working out the CLI way but that forces you to understand it. My concerns are the similarity of this to another well known OS that makes everything easy until it goes wrong.

Take the mandrakeuser the other day who lost a large part of their disk from diskdrake. Nothing sinister or even nothing strange it's just it reserves 5% of space for root by default, as does mkfs(since thats what is uses in the background). The point is man mkfs tells you how to change this amount AND it tells you lots of other tuning options you'd never see from diskdrake.

 

I haven't tried extreme disk tuning in linux but i have on solaris and you can easily double your disk access this way and save space at the same time.

 

So my message is man is your friend, don't forget him... he's got all those really cool tips hidden inside and youll never see them if you use the wizards until something goes wrong.

[iphitus]

I was resizing an empty FAT32 partition. Using the space created i made my /home partition.

 

I was prepared to lose data. I didn't care too much when i though i lost it.

I only had stuff i'd downloaded of the internet and some programs configs.

Anyway, mandrake mounted the new partition at /home but when i unmounted it all my stuff was there. Disk drake said it had moved it.

 

Anyway i fixed everything in less than an hour, if i hadn't done that LFS i'd be dead, lost whatever you want to say. I'll use fdisk and mkfs next time.

Edit: I always end up using mkfs anyway as diskdrake doesn't do it.

 

Anyway that was a stupid post of me letting off steam. Mods? delete this if you want. But still I wouldn't reccomend DiskDrake to any newbie (like me) without much experience at command line (i've got some).

 

 

James

[aRTee]

Small addition: Diskdrake is the wizard, and doesn't allow you to do your own wizardry.

Meaning: I have a heavily edited /etc/fstab, and when diskdrake (luckily) prompted to ask whether to write it, my alarmbells started ringing. So I made a copy.

Sure enough, it had demolished and left out quite a few of the good parts, the (possibly illegal) entry I had once made so my dvd-rom can be mounted as scsi, but in safe mode will be mounted as standard ide; the extra entries made by and for k3b (that would p!ss me off, not being able to burn cd's anymore, until I would find out what caused the problem).

 

On the whole I like diskdrake, since I am careful and mistrust it. And don't expect too much.

 

And I always check the drive numbers etc. But in my experience they never got swapped...

[SoulSe]

I wouldn't consider using diskdrake after the mess it made of writing my partition table in my first upgrade from 9.0.  But as i posted to rcxau just last week .... ANY TIME YOU MODIFY THE PARTITION TABLE BE PREPARED! 

I think that anyone here would agree that the upgrade option was your problem. I don't thing stuff ups like that can be blamed on tools when they occur during an upgrade, which is never a good idea.

I have successfully used diskdrake many times. I have also had some disasters. Anytime you work with data, I don't care what kind of tools you have, you must have an alternative emergency plan, or be willing to start from scratch. I don't think that is diskdrake; I think that is computers!

I agree. And I actually enjoy working with diskdrake, it has a nice GUI, it is quick and easy and I have had very few problems, except having to modify lilo after making changes (which takes half a minute).

[Gowator]

Gowator wrote:  

I wouldn't consider using diskdrake after the mess it made of writing my partition table in my first upgrade from 9.0. But as i posted to rcxau just last week .... ANY TIME YOU MODIFY THE PARTITION TABLE BE PREPARED!

 

Sorry, I should really have said install since it was a clean install but with existing partitions.

 

I agree it was my fault, I was actually distracted at the time.... however my problems are very much like the ones Steve Scrimpshire had.

Neither of us are newbies ... I could have actually aborted the install right up to the point it tried to write my partition table and failed. There was very little left to do after that apart from stick the disk in another machine and use gpart to try asnd recover the partition.

 

The reason I had the Compact flash plugged in is becuase I know if I don't have a usb mass storage plugged in at install time ... well its a whole load of pain afterwards.

 

The point I really wanted to make is that many of the tools actually are really nice and work well most of the time. Actually I still use a lot of them although I know how to do it other ways.

However they do have bugs, especailly for someone just installed from the CD's who hasn't yet downloaded 300MB of updates!

 

The problem I see is they encourage a noobie (2nd spelling I know) to do things they don't understand. Niether do they instruct on what they are doing or what to do next.

For you or me or many more experienced users if it hasn't modded lilo its not really a problem but imagine a noobie who has just come from Windows .... If they didn't have this board to turn to what next ....

 

 

I think an analogy:

OK, any idiot can shoot a gun. (I'll try and avoid Flamethrowers :wink: )

Its not difficult, you put in the bullets and pull the trigger.

However not any idiot can safely handle a gun. It might be easy to just aim and squeeze but thats an accident waiting to happen.

Now once you are practiced and safe you forget all the safety procedures because they are ingrained so deep they happen without thinking.

 

I'd never load a hunting rifle with a hair trigger unless the safety was on and the trigger not activated, its an unconcious though to first release the trigger and flip on the safety.

 

Its the same thing with some of the tools.

here it is just squeeze (sorry click) .. click click. without understanding the mechanisms or consequences.

 

Perhaps a less extreme version is teaching someone to drive, you don't just hand over the keys and let em experiment.

 

OK so were talking data loss not loss of life ....

 

But just look through the posts here. Even experts post up, hey I just used DRAK.... AND.....

The answers tend to be longer and more involved than someone saying,

I just used mkfs -x -y -z and ....

 

I got completely lost with the Internet Connection Sharing Wizard, thank goodness for MOTTS. But what struck me was actually the comment on shorewalls website for mandrake users ....

 

The Mdk install doesn't follow the Shorewall easy config path. Hey theyre both valid when they work but if the Mdk one doesn't your stuck, if the shorewall one doesn't its all explained in the HOWTO's.

 

SouleSe wrote:

I agree. And I actually enjoy working with diskdrake, it has a nice GUI, it is quick and easy and I have had very few problems, except having to modify lilo after making changes (which takes half a minute).

 

 

Hey, I agree: Its going in the right direction for 'usability'. Its just I think it needs more documentation and a few more warnings....

My experiences however lead me to believe the tools are not reliable enough or flexible enough for true noobies.

 

What they are leading to is a generation of Linux users who don't understand what's happening. I don't have a problem with that, I don't subscribe to the "I had it hard so you should too" school, but I believe Linux should always try and encourage understanding.

 

 

I actually agree with rcxau: in that the thread is noobies beware... not advanced users shouldn't use it. I probably over reacted saying I'll never use it again ... I felt like that after the 'accident' but its gone now :-) but I'd really not encourage a noobie to use it without knowing whjat else was modified etc.

 

Back in pre-history ... when I used to dual boot ... I used Partition Magic ...

This was really cool because it explained everything and told you the consequences and reasons. DiskDrake needs something like this (IMHO) documentation.

 

Its the same with losts of other wizards .... trying to work out where they went wrong, what they changed etc. which files ....

 

So tip of the day:

Before running a wizard make sure you have noted your system time/date.

Try and leave a decent amount of time before you run it when your system is quite static.

 

After your wizard do find . -amin xx |grep -v /var/log >changed ~/<wizname>change.log

 

aru... I'm on Win$ at the moment, could you correct the above...

 

That way you have a log of the changes made by the wizard .....

It wouldn't hurt to actually look at it either.

 

 

 

[iphitus]

you're right. Although I didn't care too much if disk drake stuffed, i was willing to accept it. I also knew enough to know the chances of damage to my LFS were extremely low. I was manipulatiing things on the other side of the drive, I mean, diskdrake should be able to do a simple FAT32 resize then create new partition out of empty space. Anyway, i'll still probably use diskdrake in the future should the need arise i knew how to fix things the last two times, and i can get help here should something bad happen. I also don't have much valuable stuff on the drive, most of it is programming and reference material or mp3s i can get again easily. I have cable now :P . And i wouldn't call myself a n00b, I've i mean i've got a LFS going real sweet, xmms and Firebird tommorow. However i sure ain't experienced, i've got a helluva lot to learn!!!

But i will always backup important files, and i do.

 

James