Bug#326658: partman shrinks extended partition, breaks DOS compatibility
On Sun, 4 Sep 2005 23:02:07 +0200 (CEST) you wrote:
>
> During install of Sarge from DVD unto an empty, prepartitioned IDE
> harddrive, I chose Manually edit partition table, since there was no
> choice to escape partitioning altogether. Afterwards I found that
> my extended partition had been shrunk by 62 sectors to make room for
> a tiny amount of free space ahead of it, and that the first logical
> partition -- an (unformatted) FAT32 partition -- had had its start
> sector changed from 63 to 1.
I am sorry for bringing this up with such delay but I would appreciate
if you can remember what the partition table was.
In order to make the partition table compatible with DOS,
partman/parted try not to use the first track of the hard disk
(i.e. the first 63 sectors). I suppose that initially the disk had an
extended partition that ocupied the whole disk space? In such
situation parman/parted is supposed to exclude the first track from
the extended partition, provided it is not used by any logical
partition.
You wrote that such transformation of the partition table brokes the
DOS compatibility. Can you confirm that? If this is so, then this is
something new for me and probably for the parted maintainer also.
What do you mean by "the first logical partition -- an (unformatted)
FAT32 partition -- had had its start sector changed from 63 to 1"?
Are you sure that the logical partition outside of the extended
partition? (the logical partition started from sector 1 and the
extended from sector 63).
> I suspect this was caused by the call to minimize_extended_partition()
> in command_partitions() (in parted_server.c from partman v63 sources).
>
> In any case I found it disconcerting and unwelcome, since the only way
> to reclaim the freed space and restore DOS compatibility I could think of
> was to delete the affected logical partition and create a new one
> in cfdisk that incorporated all the free space.
Partman always minimizes the size of the extended partition but this
should not break the DOS compatibility. I think that cfdisk also
minimizes the extended partition.
Anton Zinoviev
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