@Alex Since you apparently TL:DR'd my previous emails - a short summary. I`m a tester not a dev, i dont have to and i dont really know much about hdd geometry and possible influence of changing it. I incorrectly assumed that any change done will be considered with other peoples in mind, not only the commiter's biddings. I failed. The problem is that now, with every crossing of the drive geometry changing rev i need to recreate all the partitions used and copy back the needed data. In case of real hardware, it may take up to one hour, which is almost a third of my whole free time in my standard working day, a majority of which is taken by ROS.
From what i tested on real hw rig with 54528. Two partition setup on 40GB hdd, 2GB for ROS and rest for data. When installing head on rev with old geometry, it works fine.
Reinstalling rev with old geometry - the bigger partition is unreadable, can only be wiped clean and unreadable.
I couldn't reproduce it on VBox, but also i was not able to create an identical virtual hdd as the one used in real hw rig.
So no problem at all. The rigs are to be dismounted and stored for a year or two, in the meantime the geometry change should be distant enough not to bother anymore. Sorry for the fuss. I should follow Ged's advice and keep posting nice, gentle emails to ros-dev, to have them ignored like most of the previous one.
It was a great timing by the way, with the long-awaited release, we have a serious change in, consequences of which might reveal in near future, days, weeks - or perhaps right after the release.
Again, sorry for raising this as a serious issue. I obviously shouldn't be bothered.
Regards