I'm not sure if this behaviour is already accounted for in the recent changes to the installer/partitioning. Could somebody check this? I tried a installation via the liveCD/graphical installer. The three already existing partitions (hde1,hde2,hde3) contain another system. In the installer the "recommended layout" was chosen, adding a logical partition, containing three partitions for boot, swap and root to be created in the free space. During the installation all (!) partitions were deleted, existing ones recreated, and new ones created. The recreation of the existing partitions messed up the partition table. The existing partitions were slightly altered in their sizes. In this case the partition hde1 was smaller than before and smaller than the contained filesystem, afterwards. In a worst case scenario this can render the whole system unusable. I think in no circumstances existing partitions should be touched, unless they are selected for resizing, deleting... The disk *before*: sbin/sfdisk -d /dev/hde 0 jobs 0 exit 06-06-19 23:08 # Partitionstabelle von /dev/hde unit: sectors /dev/hde1 : start= 63, size= 8388608, Id=83, bootable /dev/hde2 : start= 8389584, size= 20971520, Id=83 /dev/hde3 : start= 29362032, size= 12582912, Id=83 /dev/hde4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 The disk *after* Sorry, I was shocked and recovered the partition table immediately using gparted.
This is likely fixed in CVS as the partitioning code was largely rewritten a few months ago. Please try updating to CVS with '/opt/installer/misc/updategtkfe' and trying to reproduce.
Unfortunately I'm using the liveCD because I don't have an internet connection. Is there any updated version of the liveCD?
Not until 2006.1 is released in a couple months...
In a couple of months... until then tens or hundreds of people will find this bug the hard way, having no fun, probably turning away from gentoo forever. At least there should be a warning about serious partitioning issues in the 2006.0 livecd installer in the approrpiate section in the manual/documentation!
This bit me too. I have a Windows partition, /boot, /, /home and a linux swap. I didn't realise but the partitions were not in disk order according to fdisk after the installer bombed. The installer formatted the /dev/hda5 (/home) partition erasing 30GB of my data even though i selected not to format it in the installer settings, it also messed with the partition sizes. It should have only formatted the /boot and / like i specified. I wish i'd have done the manual install like i usually do and none of this would have happened. Please at least give users a warning if there are risks like this with the gui installer.
I also had some problems with the partitioning (am doing a good old manual install at the moment ;-), both in the 2006.0 version of the installer and in the one via /opt/installer/misc/updategtkfe. I think in my case it may have to do with the fact that I have included /etc/fstab options as mount options, e.g. "noatime, nodev" etc. The 2006.0 version broke with something like "failed to mount". Improvements I see are: * provide clearer explanation as to what are the mount options (don't really see them in the manual install) * keep all parameters (even in case of a installer crash or abort). I had to re-enter the mount points for all my 8 partitions. Stylewise the installer looks promising and sleek! Bram
That has nothing to do with partitioning. The reason it failed is probably because you put spaces between the mount options. That doesn't really work :P Anyway, closing this bug since it's mostly likely fixed by the 0.4 installer release that will be on the 2006.1 livecd.
