On Tuesday 19 September 2006 9:35 pm, Carl Hartung wrote:
On Tuesday 19 September 2006 21:19, M Harris wrote: <snippage>
I am going to have to try this myself just for fun... but I suspect that the reason the entries are greyed out is that the partitions mount points SHOULD NOT BE CHANGED.
I'd say mount point editing is grayed out because the mount points can't be edited while the partition being worked on isn't mounted. ;-) I also suspect the same code stack on the DVD/CD is shared by both the installation and repair systems. Functions may be available in the installation system because it is specifically designed to assemble and install a working system, whereas the repair system environment may only support a subset of those functions, leaving the unsupported ones grayed out in that context.
Now that I have a working system, I went back to the repair option of the installation DVD and found the following, which really seems to confirm that there's a bug here: 1. If you simply enter the partition tool and exit immediately, attempting to change nothing, you get the message Yast needs a root partition to install. Assign the mount point "/" to a partition. And of course you can't do that because the mount points are greyed out. So there's no way to accomplish anything at all with the partition tool in the repair option. 2. If you select the edit option for an existing partition, the Help on the left says: On already existing partitions, you can change everything except the start and size of the partition. But in fact the only thing you can change is the filesystem ID, which you probably would not want to change. Or you can reformat the partition. Not only can you not change the mount point; you can't change the fstab options either. As a number of people have pointed out, there indeed are several other ways besides this tool to fix partitioning problems: entering the rescue system and using cfdisk and also editing /etc/fstab to adjust mount points; entering the rescue system and summoning up Yast from there; calling Yast directly from a working system; etc. My point is that the partitioning tool should do what is claimed for it, and that's true even if there are other alternatives to using it, so the existence of other alternatives for doing the same thing isn't really relevant to whether or not there's a bug in the partitioning tool. Paul