gparted suggests mtools which is useful in a live environment

[Michael Lueck]

Starting up this weekend's Live DVD of Xubuntu, trying to inspect the partitions on the drive using Gparted, it complains it wants package mtools added in order to display EFI partition correctly.

I exit Gparted, add it to the Live session via:
sudo apt-get install mtools

Once that finishes, I restart Gparted, and no more error in the row containing the EFI partition.

I just completed a load off a fresh boot of the same DVD, the same error opening Gparted did not happen. Perhaps the Live installer added the package dynamically since it was instructed to provision an EFI partition? Not sure.

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1962467

[Michael Lueck (mlueck)]

Still present in Xubuntu 20220402 Daily jammy-desktop-2022-04-02-amd64.iso

!Warning
Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.
The cause might be a missing software package.
The following list of software packages is required for fat32 file system support: dosfstools, mtools.

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ dpkg -l | grep dosfstools
ii dosfstools 4.2-1build2 amd64 utilities for making and checking MS-DOS FAT filesystems
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ dpkg -l | grep mtools
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

@vorlon, should this be resolved in the gparted packaging, or should Xubuntu pull in the additional packages for our live session?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

gparted currently only suggests mtools (and a slew of packages for working with filesystems) if these other packages are really helpful it seems to me like a Recommends on them would be more appropriate. This would be worth discussing with the debian maintainer of the package.

[Ilan Tal (ilan-tal)]

I just want to add that today 31-Dec-2023 I was having a lot of trouble reformatting a disk on key.
I used gparted and tried to format to fat32 and it complained not having dosfstools and mtools, so that it couldn't format correctly. I looked with syaptic and dosfstools was installed.
I finally came across your post and installed mtools.
I fired up gparted again, and the problem was gone!

What I read on other posts was that I needed to do the work on a Windows machine, which wasn't exactly appealing. Your post saved the day for me. Thanks.

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

mtools is now included on the Xubuntu 24.04 install media:

https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/daily-live/current/noble-desktop-amd64.manifest