Bug#237152: Ultra Enterprise 450 installation report

[Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>]

Hi Gunnar,

Thanks a lot for you report and investigations.  I think that now I
have enough information to fix the installer for Sun disk labels.

1. Linux and parted support up to 7 partitions (8 with the whole disk
   partition).  Indeed, this is not going to be changed.

2. However the problem is that you discovered an unknown bug in the
   support of sun disk labels in libparted.  Namely when libparted
   creates a new empty Sun disk label, no partition can be added to
   it.  In order to edit the partition table one has to write it to
   the disk and then reopen it.  This bug can not be detected with
   parted because parted always writes the new partition table to the
   disk and reopens it for the consecutive editing commands.

On 10.III.2004 at 09:21 Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> > >   In /var/log/partman, I got:
> > >   (...)
> > >   parted_server: OUT: 8   21607686144-22032207359 424521216       primary ext3       /dev/scsi/host    1/bus0/target3/lun0/part8  
> > >   parted_server: OUT: -1  22032207360-36417116159 14384908800     primary    free    /dev/scsi/host    1/bus0/target3/lun0/part-1
> > > 
> > >   The problem seems to be parted (or one of the d-i modules) not being
> > >   able to see beyond three bits worth of partitions :(
> > 
> > I can not guess what is wrong wrong in the log?
> 
> After the eight partition (/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target3/lun0/part8 -
> Excuse me for the extra spaces in what I pasted, blame my terminal)
> was created, the next partition that parted tries to create is
> /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target3/lun0/part-1 - This seems like an overflow
> for a signed three-bit value. (now, why would it be signed? :-/ )

No this is OK -- parted gives number -1 to all free spaces.

Anton Zinoviev