Comment 20 for bug 545911

Hi Phillip,

Other bug posts that are related to this bug post are as follows:

gparted just crash when my thumbdrive (Kingston DataTraveler G3 4Gb) is pluged in.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gparted/+bug/657784

Gparted close when mount usb device
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gparted/+bug/695341

Verbatim USB stick crashes gParted
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gparted/+bug/710696

There have also been at least two reports of this problem upstream in the bug-parted mailing lists:

Re: Bug report
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2011-02/msg00002.html

Verbatim USB drive crashes libparted
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2011-02/msg00000.html

In each of the above two cases, I manually went through the calculations for head_size (the number of sectors that would pass under a single disk head in a single rotation of the disk), and in each case the value was greater than 63. From the MBR specification, the range for sectors is from 1 to 63.
Master Boot Record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

There is also a post in the parted-devel mailing list regarding this problem:

> 63 heads. Why does this keep coming up?
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2011-February/003796.html

I think it would be preferable if the libparted library were better able to indicate this problem to the user, as opposed to throwing a stack trace.