Comment 4 for bug 556621

Thanks for that information, Ted!

We can certainly tell in the partitioner whether we're reformatting an existing partition or not; maybe not 100% reliably if somebody deletes a partition, commits, and re-creates another one in the same place, but with some reliability. That said I'm not especially keen on creating bugs at this point even if we think we can get it right.

So, I'm quite tempted to add this but make it configurable using an off-by-default preseed question, so you could say partman-ext3/lazy_itable_init=true as a boot parameter. That would make testing on my 1TB external disk more bearable.