Activity log for bug #1012863

Date Who What changed Old value New value Message
2012-06-13 21:11:39 Jeff Lane  bug added bug
2012-06-16 03:35:24 Phillip Susi affects debian-installer (Ubuntu) partman-partitioning (Ubuntu)
2012-06-16 03:35:24 Phillip Susi partman-partitioning (Ubuntu): importance Undecided Low
2012-06-16 03:35:24 Phillip Susi partman-partitioning (Ubuntu): status New Triaged
2012-06-16 03:38:24 Phillip Susi description On a server, I have three disks: /dev/cciss/c0d0 <- onboard RAID LUN of 146GB /dev/sda, /dev/sdb <- SAN LUNs of 2.4TB each I am attempting to install Ubuntu Server 10.04.4 on this machine. During partitioning, I elected to do manual partitioning. I created a 140GB root filesystem partition on the onboard RAID and also a 6GB swap partition on the RAID device. Next, I attempted to create a single 2.4GB partition on the first SAN device, /dev/sda. From the manual partiton summary screen in d-i, I chose sda. On the next screen I chose "Create a new partition". On the next screen, the partition creation screen, I am told that the maxiumum size I can create is 2.4 TB. So I create a single 2.4TB partition to be used to store data and hit Continue. This moves me to the Primary or Logical screen and I chose to make this a Primary partition. When I click Continue, I am brought to an Error screen that says the following: "partition length of 4683671552 sectors exceeds the msdos-partition-table-imposed maximum of 4294967295" Clicking continue here brings me back to the partition summary screen without my new partition. I am not given the option at any point to use a different partition table layout that DOES support 2.4TB partitions. As this is geared toward servers, and undoubtedly, servers have a very good chance of having more than 2TB of disk storage that need to be partitioned off, this is a big weakness in the Ubuntu Server installer. If you have a disk that is larger than the 2TiB limit for the dos partition table, but it has a dos partition table on it, d-i offers the free space line that lets you choose to create a primary/logical partition in the dos partition table. It offers a maximum size greater than the 2tb dos partition table limit and if you select that size, it then errors trying to create it. If you hit enter on the whole disk instead of the free space, it correctly offers to create an empty ( gpt ) partition table, and all is well. If you are still using a dos partition table, then it should not offer to create partitions that do not fit.