Bug#80325: Installer misreports partition numbers
Package: boot-floppies
Version: 2.2.17
Severity: grave
I was trying to install Debian 2.2r2 (downloaded official ISO image) on
a machine on a 4GB SCSI disk (IBM) where the following operating systems
were already installed: Red Hat 7.0, Free BSD 4.1 and OpenStep 4.2. I
was planning to replace Red Hat with Debian. Here is how the disk was
partitioned:
/dev/sda1: physical Linux partition (it contained the '/ ' partition of
the Red Hat installation)
/dev/sda2: physical partition, containing the OpenStep installation
/dev/sda3: physical partition, containing the Free BSD installation
/dev/sda4: extended partition, containing the following logical
partitions:
/dev/sda5: Linux Swap (Type 82)
/dev/sda6, /dev/sda7, /dev/sda8, /dev/sda9: Linux (Type 83) partitions
This is what the hard disk was partitioned like, and it's also what
fdisk reported when called from the Debian installer. So far, so good.
But in the menu "initialize a swap partition", the partition offered was
/dev/sda9, not /dev/sda5 as expected. When I mindlesly pressed the
return key, the installer initialized the 'real' sda9 as a swap
partition. After this, I checked "Do without a swap partition", and the
menu "mount a previously initialized Linux partition" offered to mount
/dev/sda10 through /dev/sda13, rather than /dev/sda6 through /dev/sda9.
Since the offered partitions didn't exist, the installer understandably
failed to mount them.
Something causes the installer to report partition numbers on my machine
with an offset of 4, while the programs called by the installer (like
fdisk and mount) recognize them correctly.
Diagnosis:
I don't really have one, just a clueless suggestion: could this have
something to do with the four slices which the Free BSD partition is
divided into?
Anyway, I can see two problems here:
1. The installer gets the partition numbers wrong, which it shouldn't.
2. The choices presented in menus like 'initialize a swap partition' or
'mount a previously initialized Linux partition' cannot be edited,
forcing the user either to live with bogus choices or refrain from
installing Debian.
Regards, Thomas
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