The GTK installer just wiped the partition table on my primary hard drive. Thanks to its prominent console output, I was able to recreate the partition table and get back up and running, but many users would not have that ability and could lose everything. And it was scary anyway. To reproduce: Boot 2006.0 LiveCD, in my case on x86. Manually mount an existing hard drive partition somewhere in /mnt, forget to umount it. Run installer, set to format another partition on the same drive. In output log: *snip* GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 1 has origminor 1...saving start sector 63 and end sector 1124549 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 2 has origminor 2...saving start sector 41287050 and end sector 586067264 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 3 has origminor 3...saving start sector 1124550 and end sector 21205799 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 5 has origminor 5...saving start sector 41287113 and end sector 51102764 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 7 has origminor 7...saving start sector 52098858 and end sector 63360359 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 8 has origminor 8...saving start sector 63360423 and end sector 288655919 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 9 has origminor 9...saving start sector 288655983 and end sector 586067264 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting old minor 1 to be recreated later GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting old minor 5 to be recreated later GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting old minor 7 to be recreated later GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting old minor 8 to be recreated later GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Could not delete partition...ignoring GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting old minor 9 to be recreated later GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Could not delete partition...ignoring GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting extended partition with minor 2 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Deleting old minor 3 to be recreated later GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partitioning: Second pass... GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partitioning: Third pass....creating partitions GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Drive has 586072368 sectors GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 1 has 549MB GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Old start sector 63 retrieved GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Retrieved start sector is not the same as the calculated next start sector GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Old end sector 1124549 retrieved GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Adding primary partition 1 from 63 to 1124549 GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Partition 2 has 266005MB GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Old start sector 41287050 retrieved GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Retrieved start sector is not the same as the calculated next start sector GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Old end sector 586067264 retrieved GLI: March 16 2006 00:35:58 - Adding extended partition 2 from 41287050 to 1124549 *snip* (Note "could not delete partition" lines--those were the mounted partitions.) Followed by some installer warnings about it being a serious error... fired up fdisk, hit "p", nothing listed. (Actually one tiny partition was there, but I was too startled to remember very well.) Sorry I don't have the rest of the installer log: I was too pre-occupied with making sure I didn't lose those precious sector numbers. There was some messaging about not being able to create partitions with end positions before their beginnings. Again, I'm sorry I didn't keep the rest of the log. I also have the "debug to console" output from the partition setup screen, if that'd be helpful.
I *could* fix this by automatically unmounting any partitions that are being affected by the partitioning, but I don't think that's the right solution. I could also warn that there are mounted partitions on one of the detected disks, but that's not necessarily a problem, either, especially if you're not changing anything on the disk that has the mounted partition. For now, I'm not going to do anything about it. You just shouldn't mount filesystems and then try to partition the same disk. It's silly to begin with.
After talking to another developer, I decided to just make partitioning fail before it starts removing anything if there are any filesystems mounted on that particular drive.
Fixed in CVS
Moving to Release Media/Installer.
