If a user pre-defines the partitions on the destination hard drive before an install, boots the 2006 Live CD, and then attempts to install Gentoo using the GUI installer, the GUI installer will write to the partition tables even when it doesn't need to do so. This could cause an error that results in partitions being removed/erased from the partition table. This seems to occur when the installer is instructed to format the destination partition, but not otherwise. See http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-446569-highlight-.html for user experiences with this problem.
This was due to a shortcoming in the way the partitioning code was written. I just recently finished a rewrite in CVS that addresses all known partitioning issues. When the partitioning code begins looking at each drive, it does a few checks first: * if any partitions are mounted on that drive, it bails out * if there are any "unknown" partitions (he warning given by the FE was ignored), it bails out * if nothing has changed on the drive, it skips to the next one * if the type and size of all the partitions are the same in the old and new layout, it jumps past the first 3 steps (delete/resize/recreate) straight to the formatting step There have also been a few other improvements. Since formatting is separate from recreating the partitions now, a failure to format won't kill the install before all your partitions have been recreated. It also now properly handles existing partition layouts that are out of physical disk order (the current release *really* botches this). With these changes, it is *very* unlikely that someone will lose their partition table. Even if they do, it is even more unlikely that there will be any data loss (currently caused by partitions being out of disk order).
I have to reopen this, as I had NO way of avoiding my hdd partition table being messed up, layout being changed and recalculated from 16 to 255 heads. I've tried both installer on 2006.0 livecd and the installer-20060625.tar.bz2 as taken by the command updategtkfe. The way I see it, there might be 3 solutions: 1. Have a checkbox 'Don't touch this drive'. 2. If none of the partitions are marked for formatting, ignore the drive completely. 3. Fix the code that calculates the sizes so that it takes into consideration the current CHS values in the partition table.
