Public bug reported:
I've tried last week to install Dapper Drake over my Breezy Whatever
test installation on my hda8. Installation failed however at the
partitioning step, because I meanwhile modified my hard disk
partitioning table.
NOTE:
This is not a bug report, just a complaint. Bug won't happen for a enough users
to be worth to fix.
DETAILS:
I had an orphaned/unlinked main (MBR) partition, which starts at the cylinder
boundary, like all main partitions. Since all four slots were however occupied
meanwhile, but I wanted to access the data on it, I had to hack it into the
extended partitions chain.
Partitions in the extendeds chain now typically start at a head boundary
(63 sectors later than a main partition in one of the four MBR slots
would), because the entry for a (type 0x05 / 0x85) extended partition
chain table already occupies the sector at the cylinder boundary.
So that made me add/introduce it as my new /dev/hda9 into the extpart
table of /dev/hda8. Typically an extpart table only contains one real
subpartition and an optional link to another extpart table, whereas my
new one contained two real subpartitions instead.
And now here's the story:
Besides the uncommonnes of this partitioning sheme, the Linux kernel
very well can access all my partitions (hda1 to hda9).
Vanilla fdisk however can only detect up to hda8 and discards the hda9
entry as garbage (and would dispose it onto saving back a new mbr with
its extpart chain), because it only expects/handles one real
subpartition per extpart table.
The Dapper Drake install partitioning tool however, COMPLETELY FAILS and
discards all my partitions - unlike the kernel and fdisk which provided
a graceful fallback at least.
Now obviously, a setup tool can't match itself with an operating system in
terms of functionality and support for such convoluted pseudo-standards as x86
partitioning. But I'm somewhat disappointed nevertheless here, because this
reveals another unneeded case of wheeloritis or NIH syndrome.
If fdisk already supports partitioning in a sane way, then why was its proved
and more reliable code not reused for the Dapper setup/partitioning tool?
HOW TO FIX:
Please repost into appropriate subprojects bugreport list.
** Affects: Ubuntu
Importance: Untriaged
Status: Unconfirmed
--
Dapper install partitioning tool fails on uncommon extened partitions
https://launchpad.net/bugs/54871
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