Bug#326658: partman shrinks extended partition, breaks DOS compatibility

[Lars Helgeland <lhelgeland@yahoo.com>]

Package: installation-reports

During install of Sarge from DVD unto an empty, prepartitioned IDE
harddrive, I chose Manually edit partition table, since there was no
choice to escape partitioning altogether.  Afterwards I found that
my extended partition had been shrunk by 62 sectors to make room for
a tiny amount of free space ahead of it, and that the first logical
partition -- an (unformatted) FAT32 partition -- had had its start
sector changed from 63 to 1.

I suspect this was caused by the call to minimize_extended_partition()
in command_partitions() (in parted_server.c from partman v63 sources).

In any case I found it disconcerting and unwelcome, since the only way
to reclaim the freed space and restore DOS compatibility I could think of
was to delete the affected logical partition and create a new one
in cfdisk that incorporated all the free space.

--
Lars