Bug#265194: resizing needs to be mentioned more in the partitioning utility

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

reassign 265194 partman-partitioning
thanks

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 10:04:41PM -0700, Dustin Harriman wrote:
> 
> So I was about to give up that it was
> even possible to resize the partition, but in a giddy moment of reckless
> abandon, I hit enter on the line that I assumed merely reported the size
> of the partition.  Then the screen went all blue and my disk LED started
> thrashing madly!  I was freaked out: was it erasing my Windows partition? 
> WTF?  There was no informational message like "scanning the partition,
> please wait".  There needs to be an informational message during that
> minute where it paused to scan the vfat partition!

I can not remember such a long pause here and I don't know which part of
resizing script is causing it.

> Also, the installation documentation here:
> http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch06s03.html#id2514217
> which talks about partitioning never mentions the word "resize".  I expect
> this documentation to at least mention which types of partition are in
> fact resizable: vfat? (apparently yes, I didn't actually perform it) 

Yes.

> ntfs? (I hope yes!)  

No. ntfs is completely unsupported by d-i although so many file systems
are supported.

> ext2? ext3? 

Yes.

> reiserfs?

I don't know.  Depends on whether libreiserfs is installed in the
installer or not.

If the user tries to resize a partition with unsupported file system the
following happens:

1. If the partition doesn't exist on the disk (because it is new) then
it is immediately resized

2. If the partition exists on the disk then
   a. the user sees a confirmation dialog
   b. the changes are written to the disk
   c. partman attemts to resize (it simply uses the capability of
parted)
   d. parted fails but partman doesn't care about this
   e. the user is returned to the main partitioning screen where the
partition has its old size

> Having said this, I have not attempted to resize an NTFS partition with
> the latest version of qtparted (which is 0.4.4).  Has anyone else? 
> Reliably?  Unreliably?  After applying Windows XP service pack 2? ;)

I know nothing about ntfs. :(

Anton Zinoviev