Manual partitioner gives no help when already have four primary partitions defined

Bug #86202 reported by Stephen Gornick
14
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubiquity (Ubuntu)
Expired
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

When I install Feisty and I choose to do Manual partitioning, there is nothing that Ubiquity does to tells me why I cannot add a new partition in the free space. I already have four primary partitions defined so of course I cannot add another partition. However, unless I already knew there is a limit of four primary/extended partitions, I would think that the "Prepare partitions" was broken because when you double-click on the "free space", nothing happens.

How to recreate:
Launch Feisty LiveCD install,
In "Prepare Disk Space" step, select Manual partitioning.
Add partitions until there are four primary partitions defined, leaving some "free space" yet.
Double-click on the "free space".
Instead of getting the "Create partition" dialog box, nothing happens.

Expected behavior:
If I try to add a fifth partition, maybe display an error message to tell me that there is a limit of four primary partitions, and that to get more partitions I can go with three primary partitions and then add logical partitions from there?

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Herd4 i386

Related branches

description: updated
Colin Watson (cjwatson)
Changed in ubiquity:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
houstonbofh (leesharp) wrote :

As a frequent visitor/contributor to Ubuntu Forums, I can see this generating a lot of new user posts.

An example of how this could happen.

User has XP, and shrinks partition. User reads that a fat 32 partition should be used to share files. User reads that a /boot partition should be first so the system can boot large drives. User creates /, and hits 4. Now user attempts to create swap, and fails. User posts to Ubuntu Forums about how everyone is a jerk. :)

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

I've made it at least mark unusable free space as such, so that you have some kind of visual hint. A tooltip with more information would be nice, but that's going to be tricky until better support for tooltips in treeviews is added in a future release of GTK.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

This fixes part of the problem. As mentioned previously, the rest is hard for now.

ubiquity (1.4.4) feisty; urgency=low

  * New partitioner:
    - Mark unusable free space as such (part of LP: #86202).
    - Add "Used" column (LP: #96126).
    - Pressing Enter in the create/edit dialog mount point entry box
      activates the OK button.
  * Old partitioner: Work around yet another hard-to-explain crash due to a
    partition being missing from /proc/partitions (LP: #73058).
  * KDE frontend:
    - Disable subsidiary autopartitioning options according to the primary
      selection (thanks to Thorbjørn Tux for prompting me with suggestions;
      LP: #85980).
    - Guard against on_partition_list_*_activate being called with no
      partition selected (LP: #95429).
  * Issue a debugging message any time a process exits, not just when it
    exits non-zero.
  * Disable migration-assistant if using the old partitioner: it crashes and
    is probably too much trouble to fix.
  * Avoid crashing in certain progressposition methods if no progress bar is
    running (LP: #51077).
  * Return to partitioning if you back up from partman-commit (LP: #78930).
  * Adjust ubiquity/text/partition_help, ubiquity/text/finished_label,
    debian/intro-alpha.txt, and debian/intro-beta.txt to avoid the
    grammatical error "make sure to" (LP: #86284).
  * Automatic update of included source packages: base-installer
    1.70ubuntu6, partman-auto 62ubuntu8, partman-partitioning 47ubuntu5,
    silo-installer 1.07ubuntu4.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:39:53 +0100

description: updated
summary: - Ubiquity gives no help when already have four primary partitions defined
+ Manual partitioner gives no help when already have four primary
+ partitions defined
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I suggest that if there are already four primary partitions, clicking the button to add a new partition should open an error alert with:
* primary text 'Sorry, adding another partition to this disk isn’t possible when it has four “primary partitions”.'
* secondary text "If you delete any of the primary partitions, you can then add as many partitions as you wish."
* five radio buttons, the first to "Leave all partitions as they are", then one each to "Delete ____" one of the primary partitions.
* "Cancel" and "Delete" buttons, where the "Delete" button is insensitive when "Leave all partitions as they are" is selected.

Revision history for this message
Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson) wrote :

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

Changed in ubiquity (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Changed in ubiquity (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Expired
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