Rescue mode should not force partition mounting

[Dan Sandberg]

I booted in the rescue mode to resize the partition that Hoary Hedgehog Preview
created ( aside: the installer told me it would give me the chance to review the
partition structure it came up with, but then went ahead and created it without
asking for explicit confirmation that the partition structure was as I wanted ).

The rescue mode forced me to choose which partition to mount. But I didn't want
to mount any partitions. The whole purpose in using the rescue mode was to NOT
mount /dev/hda1 so that I could resize it. I suppose I could try mounting one
of the other partitions ( like the swap partition ) as root but this is very
counter-intuitive. / should be mounted as a ram-disk by default and then other
partitions should be optionally mounted as well.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Rescue mode wasn't designed with this use case in mind. It seems like a
reasonable request, so perhaps it can be extended to do this in the future,
although you'd probably have to do the partition editing with parted rather than
the partition manager in the installer.

[Dan Sandberg (x-cs)]

Yup, parted is what I had in mind.

Generally speaking, often you want rescue mode because your primary partition is
fubar in one way or another. So forcing you to mount it ( which prevents parted
from running, as well as fsck, ... ) is counter-productive.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The original reason I wrote rescue mode was because a lot of people wanted to
have an easy way to use the install CD to reinstall a broken bootloader, and I
got fed up of explaining the convoluted process of doing so by hand so decided
to automate the hard parts. :-) I do agree that your case is a good one too,
though, and I'll see what I can do to implement support for it.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've synced this upload from Debian unstable:

rescue (1.20) unstable; urgency=low

  * Merge from Ubuntu:
    - Load ext4 module if available.
  * Allow operation without a root filesystem (closes: #505113).

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 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:27:53 +0000