Comment 5 for bug 1390819

Well, you were right about the problem, although changing disk labels
isn't going to find the problem, just make it worse. The
/dev/disk/by-name and /dev/disk/by-partlabel directories show symlinks to
the device numbers and by comparing you can see really quick that some
tools are using by-label while others use by-partlabel.

I really think this inconsistency, even if not a bug, is about one of the
stupidest things I've seen in a long time. The tools should be smarter
and make this stuff more bullet-proof. Rather than showing half the
information and confusing the user, why not keep the stuff in sync or at
least tell the user when things aren't in sync and give them the option to
fix it.

Quality software doesn't do half the job. This should be improved, and I
think the potential for harm (imagine deleting a partition) is high enough
to call this a bug. Granted few people ever edit partitions as I've done
(I should have used LVM or something, but I never expected to get that
crazy on a laptop). Anyway, corner car usages are what does where the
flaws are.

On Fri, Apr 10, 2015, 10:35 AM Roderick Smith <email address hidden>
wrote:

> I suspect that what you're seeing is a mis-match in the labels. Both GPT
> and most filesystems support disk labels, but there's no mechanism to
> keep them synchronized. You can try changing the disk labels in gdisk or
> cgdisk and see if the problem disappears.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1390819
>
> Title:
> fdisk/cfdisk crashes and wrong data
>
> Status in gnu-fdisk package in Ubuntu:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> This is an odd bug. cfdisk and fdisk are both showing opposite labels
> for my 9th and 10th partitions (GPT). The same bug is present in
> gdisk/cgdisk (likely shares the same code). blkid, the linux kernel,
> and parted/gparted show the correct partition table (or rather the
> kernel matches what I configured into gparted, so that defines
> "correct").
>
> Also, if you select "Info" when "Free Space" is highlighted in cfdisk,
> the program will crash.
>
> Partitioning disks and having it done in a manner that is
> deterministic and reliable is extremely important. It looks like the
> linux-tools packages are totally outdated and dangerous on new systems
> (don't support GPT), the gdisk/cgdisk packages only support GPT and
> are buggy, the gnu-fdisk packages share the bugs and instabilities of
> gdisk.
>
> Only parted/gparted is reliable. Please make note of this and either
> get someone to fix/upgrade gnu-fdisk or just cancel fdisk completely
> in support of parted.
>
> Thanks
>
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