How do I kill automounter? or: Stop the swap, PLEASE!

[dosboss]

I have been working on remastering Knoppix for my company's custom needs, and have been through a lot of problems...solved thankfully, through a combination of looking up answers here and elsewhere. Now I have a problem I have not been able to fix: I have to stop Knoppix from auto-mounting any partition on a harddrive, including the swap, hopefully without uninstalling autofs.

Allow me to explain: we use partimage in a script along with sfdisk and dd to (re)image workstations, servers, etc. Everything is automated, so when sfdisk tries to put a partition table onto a disk, it expects the disk to not be in use (I don't want to use the --force parameter for other reasons). Knoppix default CD/DVD automounts the swap partition for speed reasons, I take it. This makes sfdisk bomb out at trying to modify the partition table, but doesn't stop the script. When the script gets to the part of actually using partimage, it bombs out due to the partition not being the right size - of course with no error code whatsoever. Since the sfdisk part of the script went by so fast, tracking down this problem took some time, and led to a wild goose-chase centered around partimage's functionality.

What I have done in subsiquent Knoppix remasters is to turn off the autofs script and remove it from init.d. This stops autofs from starting at boot, or so I thought. When I do a ps auxw, there sits automount, all fat and happy. The strange thing is that it now does not mount swap partitions - at least not at boot. It will however mount swap partitions JUST AFTER sfdisk modifies and writes the partition table back to disk! This does not interfere with our script, thank goodness, but still is puzzling, and leaves open the question that if we modify our scripts in future will this behaviour be a detrement. How the hell did the automount daemon run if it was not even in the init.d? I have scanned the knoppix-autostart file, but I can't find anywhere to change it there either. I would just like to kill it, possibly uninstall it, but I think Knoppix depends on automount a bit too much for that radical of a fix.

Any thoughts?

[UnderScore]

I would edit the isolinux.cfg file and add the cheatcodes noswap and nofstab.

[dosboss]

I would edit the isolinux.cfg file and add the cheatcodes noswap and nofstab.

Thanks, underscore, that sounds like a plan. I was so focused on making changes in the OS itself I forgot about the boot parameters. I'll try it and see what effect it has on our scripts here.