Bug#355108: if parted gives an error (or doesn't know) about a partition table, partman will erase it
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)
Reply to: