Hi, Let's say I have an existing machine that was installed using the text mode trixie RC1 debian-installer, and I want to exactly copy the partition layout of this machine on the next machine.
Probably the best long term way would be to record the partitioning details in a preseed file and load that. But let's say I want to do it by hand. How? The manual partitioner accepts B, MB, GB and the binary equivalents as units. However, there is not any value I can specify that replicates an existing disk layout. For example, given this: $ head -4 /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 259 1 7501465944 nvme1n1 259 2 487424 nvme1n1p1 You'd expect that specifying "499122176B" (that's 487424 * 1024) would result in a partition of exactly 487424 1024-byte blocks being created, right? Nope, it creates one 498073600 bytes long which is exactly 1 MiB (1048576 bytes) less than what I asked for. Also trying to use MB or MiB never does result in anything that exactly matches the other existing partition layout. I can make the first partition match by manually adding 1048576 bytes and asking for that. But when I try the same trick with the next partition, again it gives me something slightly off. Why does it alter the value I specify? The other machine was installed using debian-installer so if there is some alignment thing going on, well, the original one was acceptable to debian-installer so it shouldn't need to alter the values I specify. Presumably I could replicate it by remembering the value I typed in when installing the first one, since hopefully the changes it makes are deterministic. But I don't remember. Any ideas? Perhaps I can get sfdisk into the installer environment then I could paste the output of sfdisk -d into sfdisk at a shell prompt. It feels wrong that the installer doesn't give me n amount of bytes when I ask for it with "nB". Thanks, Andy
