partitioning state not remembered between gparted and mountpoints screens

[Gabriel M.]

I was trying to use espresso to install ubuntu from the i386 lived cd, and I deleted one ext3 and one reiserfs partition using the manual partitioning tool. When I tried to create a single ext3 partition in the freed space, with the same tool, the filesystem was labeled as unknown.
I tried installing anyways but the installation failed with a "no root filesystem" message. Rebooting didn't help, the filesystem still wasn't recognized.

(Afterwards I created the partition with cfdisk and formatted it with mkfs.ext3 and rebooted and re-lauched the install, but then espresso crashed while trying to format the partitions, just after the install confirmation.)

[paulscottrobson (paulscottrobson)]

Had similar problems with 2 SATA drives partitioned as SDA1/5/6/7/8 and SDB1. mount showed that only swap (SDA6) and / (SDA5) were reported as their actual size, all others were reported as the same size as swap. Crashed out when installing grub, until then appeared to install normally. SDA7,SDA8 and SDB1 not formatted as contain data, were undamaged following reinstall of 5.10

No probs installing Dapper Flight 6 so presume it's expresso problem.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

autismuk: Your bug is different, I think; it's bug 40395.

[Einstein (father-of-relativity)]

I've expierenced this same bug. Ubuntu refuses to acknowledge manually created partitons. After attempting to do so with no sucess, I decided to try ext3 instead of reiserfs. When I hit the next button, the partition stil wasn't listed. I attempted to change the mount points of the listed file systems, but it caused the installer to crash with this message:

We're sorry; the installer crashed. Please file a bug report at https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+filebug and a developer will attend to the problem as soon as possible. To help the developers understand what went wrong, include the following detail in your bug report, and attach the files /var/log/installer/syslog, /var/log/syslog, and /var/log/partman:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 620, in on_list_changed
    self.size_widgets[index].set_text(self.set_size_msg(self.partition_widgets[index]))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 473, in set_size_msg
    size = float(self.size[self.part_devices[widget.get_active_text()].split('/')[2]])
KeyError: 'hdc3'

I'm using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, final release

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The crash reported in the previous comment is also bug 45200, and has been fixed in Ubuntu 6.06.1.

The problem here is basically that, in order to ensure consistency of how we create filesystems, we get partman to do the job; but that can only be done after going forward from the mountpoints screen, which means that if you go back to gparted before that then you'll see filesystems labelled as unknown.

I was going to fix this by rewriting the partitioner from scratch and having it *entirely* based on partman rather than just half-way, but unfortunately that didn't make the Edgy feature freeze. My current plan is to figure out a way to feed the uncommitted state back into gparted when starting it up.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This change makes it possible to fix this:

gparted (0.2.5-1.1ubuntu6) edgy; urgency=low

  * Add support for a --filesystem option which can be used in installer
    mode (only) to allow the installer to override gparted's initial idea of
    the filesystem in use on a partition. Filesystems created this way are
    considered new, so they can be resized freely, etc.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:12:48 +0100

I've committed the ubiquity fix, so it will be in my next upload.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

ubiquity (1.1.20) edgy; urgency=low

  * Only return 30 in reply to a PROGRESS command if the progresscancel
    capability is set (closes: Malone #48005).
  * Don't crash if a progress bar is set up to have the same start and end
    points (closes: Malone #56789).
  * Fix timezone component to deal with frontend.get_timezone returning None
    (closes: Malone #42865).
  * Use more sensible default cities for languages with country shortlists
    (i.e. the intended default rather than the first in alphabetical order
    of country code), working around a missing feature in debconf.
  * Pick a sensible default city for countries with multiple zones but no
    explicit default city (closes: Malone #43914).
  * Remove obsolete Recommends: gparted from ubiquity; ubiquity-frontend-gtk
    already depends on it.
  * Feed not-yet-formatted partition state back into gparted when starting
    it up, so that newly-created partitions aren't listed as "unknown" when
    you go back (requires gparted 0.2.5-1.1ubuntu8; closes: Malone #40404).
  * Fix use of gobject.spawn_async in
    gnome-screensaver-command/xscreensaver-command, broken in 1.1.19.
  * Make sure that "Restart now" is the default option on the final dialog
    (closes: Malone #61517).
  * Log warnings in various cases when partitions are ignored on the
    mountpoints page.
  * GTK frontend: For some reason GtkTable doesn't seem to queue a resize
    itself when you attach children to it, so the mountpoints table was
    showing up blank the first time through. Worked around this.
  * Add/update translations from Rosetta: Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian,
    Breton, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French, Hindi,
    Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Georgian, Korean, Kurdish, Latvian,
    Nepali, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian,
    Serbian, Tagalog.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:44:03 +0100