auto-resize primary partition constraints are too strong

[James Troup]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I tried installing an old gutsy i386 daily (20070821 - it's all I had to hand and no intarwebs to update over) on a brand new Toshiba Equium. I got as far as partioning, but at that point, ubiquity/partman/whatever failed entirely to detect the existing Vista install and offered me only 'Wipe out the entire disk, kthx' as an option.

Attaching various logfiles that I hope might be useful...

[James Troup (elmo)]

ubuntu@ubuntu:/var/log$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0b806920

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 192 5056 39074816 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 5056 9730 37538816 7 HPFS/NTFS
ubuntu@ubuntu:/var/log$

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

High-priority, but this is too scary for gutsy now. (For my record: this is because partman-auto still thinks that the root filesystem has to be primary, which used to be true but shouldn't be necessary now that the bootloader installers are smarter.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The other thing that needs to be fixed here is that partman-auto needs to ensure that there is at least one primary partition. In other words, if there is already a primary partition on the disk, then it can happily make all the new ones logical; but if the disk is empty or there are only logical partitions, then it needs to make (an arbitrary) one of the new partitions primary or else it's possible that the BIOS will get upset later.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package partman-auto - 73ubuntu4

---------------
partman-auto (73ubuntu4) hardy; urgency=low

  * Ensure that there is always at least one primary partition after
    autopartitioning. An existing primary partition on the disk satisfies
    this, as does a recipe partition explicitly marked $primary{ }; if
    neither of those exists, then arbitrarily promote the first recipe
    partition to be a primary partition.
  * Remove explicit $primary{ } specifiers from standard recipes. We only
    need them to be primary if no other primary partitions exist already.
  * Relax auto-resize constraints now that a primary partition is not
    unconditionally required; this will allow auto-resize partitioning on
    systems that already have three primary partitions (LP: #134950).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:26:42 +0000