Package: partman Severity: critical Tags: d-i Justification: causes serious data loss
Well, it seems that in some rare case (two example below) either libparted will issue an error or not know about a given partition table. In these cases, the installer will think there is no partition table, and propose the creation of a new one, erasing the old partition table, and thus causing the total loss of all data previously found on the harddisk. A proposal to fix this would be to create a partman-kernel or whatever, which would be called if libparted fails, and then go looking at /proc/partitions, to see if there are partitions there, and propose a read-only partition setup, which would allow the user to install in existing partition, and more importanly don't let him to silently over-write existing partition tables. Two recent bugs have shown that this is a problem : - One minimac user who created his partitions under mac-os-x, had an error message in parted telling about the data area not covering the whole disk, and d-i simply proposed to create a new partition table, thus loosing all existing data. - The second such issue, in bug #354991, concerned some funny new microsoft partition table format, which libparted knows nothing about, and could have resulted in the same problems as above. In general this is a failback for partition tables not knows by d-i, but handled well by the linux (or whatever) kernel used by d-i. Friendly, Sven Luther -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 Architecture: powerpc (ppc) Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-powerpc Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]