Bug#268763: If the partition table is broken, partman will show no partitions.

[Margarita Manterola <debian@marga.com.ar>]

Package: partman
Severity: normal

In a dual-boot lab I work for, the Windows administrator recently screwd
up all our GNU/Linux installations.

In many of the machines, he screwd up the partition table using
Partition Magic, or some other proprietary crap.  The thing is that the
disc was left with partitions that were inside other partitions, or that
overlapped with other partitions, depending on the case.

In many of this machines, I had to reinstall the whole system, so I went
for a Sarge Installer test.  The problem I encountered is that even if
fdisk -l /dev/hda shows the partitions, partman does not.  It allows
only to erase the whole disk.


I know it's not partman's fault that the partition table is broken, but
since it can be fixed using fdisk, there should be a way of fixing it
through partman... Or at least a big warning stating that the partition
table is broken and that data will be lost.

I hope you can have a look at this.

Love,
Marga