Bug#354991: installation-report: Partman fails to detect windows LDM partitions
On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 06:30:19PM +0000, Philip Armstrong wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 07:04:31PM +0100, Geert Stappers wrote:
> > > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424/
> >
> > What I read from it, is that it has a "another disklabel"
> > I now can imagine why partmen fails, but _I_ have no clue how to fix it.
>
> Indeed. Why MS couldn't just use Intel's GPT disklabel instead I have
> no idea. NIH syndrome presumably.
>
> If there was a way to get partman to not use parted to detect the
> partitions, but to just use the existing kernel detected ones in
What about fixing the parted support for these partition tables instead ?
Should be rather trivial if you only want detection to work.
> /proc/partitions (which of course would not be editable) then that
> would at least allow pre-existing partitions to be used by the
> installer. Perhaps partman is too closely intertwined with parted for
> this to be possible -- I haven't looked.
Partman is too intertwined with itself :) It is probably possible, but partman
is a bunch of spagethi code which is difficult to deal with, well at least for
me. I believe partman does already do its own stuff for some partition formats
or filesystems, and in any case it does its own for lvm/raid.
I guess it should be easy enough to create a partman-kernel or whatever
plugin, which would allows read-only access to partitions the kernel knows
about, and which would be a fallback when other method fail, instead of
proposing to erase the whole disk like it happens now, like the case where the
guy had a minimac and libparted issues a warning, and d-i/partman proposed to
overwrite a new partition table because of that.
This is indeed an important feature, not sure who is handling partman right
now though. I would say it is even an RC bug, probably of critical severity,
as it may cause unrelated data lose, but i will let other decide on that.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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