[Qemu-devel] Re: coping with fdisk mutation (was Re: replies)

[Jim C. Brown]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 07:51:52PM +0200, Bob Barry wrote:
> Jim -
> 
> On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:23, you wrote (to Damien Mascord):
> > > Because it is possible that 
> > > a new version of fdisk will change it's screen output and "wreck" 
> > > lomount...
> > 
> > That's the problem that we have here.
> 
> Consider sfdisk - it's intended for non-interactive (script) use.
> It is in the util-linux package (though some high-handed
> distributions omit it).  See file "sfdisk.examples" in the tarball.
> 
> Bob

It would still have the same problem: the screen output of sfdisk -l
could change and lomount would no longer work. Futhermore, there is the
problem that fdisk/sfdisk will output junk like:

                start: (c,h,s) expected (0,1,1) found (0,0,3)
                end: (c,h,s) expected (53,9,2) found (1,26,2)

which we otherwise don't care about, but which messes up the format of output.

However someone else submitted to me a program which can read the necessary
information from the disk image itself. I have merged this into lomount,
so the latest bleeding-edge version of lomount (not yet released) will work
w/o any dependences on the version of fdisk that you have.

Obviously, lomount still requires a version of mount that supports using loop
(as well as losetup) but just about everyone has that.

-- 
Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.