Gentoo overwrites partition table... [Bug 128169]

Message

cvweiss · Post by **cvweiss** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:52 pm

For starters, my 40g HD was set up into 5 partitions, hda[1-5], 1st set up for Debian boot, 2nd was a 9g spare, 3rd a 25g home partition, 4th /tmp, 5th swap.

Ok, so last night I download the Gentoo Live CD and burn it to CD. I then make sure there is nothing on hda2 (my spare) and do a mkreiserfs onto it. Then I restart the computer and boot the Live CD. All looks well, start up the GUI installer and walk through the steps on setting up the install. I take particular care on the partition section, ensuring that it won't touch any of the partition and that it will boot /dev/hda2 as root. I even unchecked the writo GRUB to the MBR option, just to make sure. As far as I could tell (and believe I checked carefully) it was not to change ANY of the other partitions. I go on through each section, and at last click Install. It fails almost immediately on a write to the partition table!

Why is it writing to the partition table?! It instructs me to reboot, which I do. That was probably a grave mistake there. When I come back, I find partitions hda[2-5] all missing. Gone. Poof. Somehow hda1 survived.

I'm not looking for help - just sharing my experience with a Gentoo install - it wiping out my home partition with everything I had on there. Ok, yes I do have some backups, but that's not the point. If Gentoo is instructed not to modify any partitions, then why is it writing to the partition table?

Zwartoog · Post by **Zwartoog** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:01 pm

Hmm, that really sucks.

Have you tried gpart to get your partition information back?

As long as only your MBR is overwritten, the contents of the partitions should be fine.

stealthy · Post by **stealthy** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:13 pm

Hmm, that is strange, and I am sort of confused too.

For starters, you said you got 5 partitions. hda[1-5] ???

Something is not right here, because according to what you are saying you have

hda1 /boot
hda2 spare
hda3 /home
hda4 /tmp
hda5 swap

Just wondering how is that possible, you see you can only have max of 4 primary partitions, and if you use all 4, you cannnot have an extended partition(hence no logical partitions either)

Or another scenario is when you have/want extended partition(for logical drives), in this case you can have max 3 primary partitions, 4th one becoming the extended partition.

Assuming that you have 3 primary partitions,

you will then have
hda1 /boot
hda2 spare
hda3 /home
hda4 extended
hda5 /tmp
hda6 swap

You also have to understand how extended partitions work, for eg. if you have only primary partition, and you try to make either extended or logical partiton, system will automatically make next available number into extended partition. For eg. if you had only one primary, and made one logical partition, this is what the system will do:
hda1 primary
hda2 extended

hda5 logical,
notice how 3,4 never get used.

logical partitions always start from 5.

I don't know if this is even related, but I am just mentioning it because gentoo's fdisk, or cfdisk is not different from fdisk from any other linux distro.
and there is nowhere in gentoo, in where it will automatically delete/create/overwrite partitions, without you actually specifying it to do so, be it intentionally or un-intentionally.

I don't know if this helps, cause I can't really see anything apart from hardware malfunction that would cause this behaviour.

cvweiss · Post by **cvweiss** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:58 pm

stealthy wrote:Hmm, that is strange, and I am sort of confused too.

For starters, you said you got 5 partitions. hda[1-5] ???

You're right, I numbered the partitions wrong purposely in my post. I typed this post in when I got to work this morning, and couldn't remember exactly which partitions the swap and tmp were assigned. However, I know for sure that /dev/hda1 was the Debian partition, /dev/hda2 the spare, and /dev/hda3 my home partition.

cvweiss · Post by **cvweiss** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:00 pm

Zwartoog wrote:Hmm, that really sucks.

Have you tried gpart to get your partition information back?

As long as only your MBR is overwritten, the contents of the partitions should be fine.

Naw, I do have backups (did lose some stuff - not much) so I wasn't too worried. This was just a major annoyance that I thought I'd share.

ggayan · Post by **ggayan** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:21 pm

Same happened to me, GUI partitioner is buggy maybe .
I Lost all my information

BitJam · Post by **BitJam** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:23 pm

There have been other posts in these fora about bugs in the partitioning part of the 2006.0 LiveCD.

I am sorry for your loss. Thank goodness you were mostly backed up.

It seems strange to me that this problem hasn't yet been fixed since it can be such an unexpected and needless disaster. It is like they are saying "trust me, trust me, trust me, ... ha ha fooled you!". I think the distribution of the LiveCD should have been halted until this problem was resolved or at the very least, HUGE warnings should have been put up explaining the danger and how to avoid it.

cvweiss · Post by **cvweiss** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 1:52 pm

BitJam wrote:There have been other posts in these fora about bugs in the partitioning part of the 2006.0 LiveCD.

I am sorry for your loss. Thank goodness you were mostly backed up.

It seems strange to me that this problem hasn't yet been fixed since it can be such an unexpected and needless disaster. It is like they are saying "trust me, trust me, trust me, ... ha ha fooled you!". I think the distribution of the LiveCD should have been halted until this problem was resolved or at the very least, HUGE warnings should have been put up explaining the danger and how to avoid it.

I have to agree! I've got my system back, but not with Gentoo. Details in another post.

alcros · Post by **alcros** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:39 pm

Hi,

I was victim of this BUG too, I was trying to install gentoo on a spare partition on my dv5000 laptop, and being a Debian old timer I really double checked that nothing had to be done with my other partitions, and voila, it did exactly the opposite. Too bad gpart only works nicely with primary partitions 'cause I was not able to get a backup for my partition table that was saved on hda6

if you do keep backups like this (dd if=/dev/hda of=boot.img count=1 bs=512), make sure you keep it on one of the primary ones.

Thanks to other backups I got back some info, but certainly not all,

does anybody know if this has been reported?

yabbadabbadont · Post by **yabbadabbadont** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 6:48 am

Same here several days ago. The worst part is, I was only using the installer so that I would be able to provide coherent answers to people asking for help in the Installing Gentoo forum... That's what I get for trying to be a nice guy I guess. (I had backups, but they were a month old, my bad) At least it gave me the push to not have Windows on my machine any more. (I didn't feel like reinstalling it as well as a manual Gentoo install)

syg00 · Post by **syg00** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:43 am

yabbadabbadont wrote:The worst part is, I was only using the installer so that I would be able to provide coherent answers to people asking for help in the Installing Gentoo forum... That's what I get for trying to be a nice guy I guess.

Feel for you.
I was thinking I'd do likewise on my test-box, but it's busy at present. God, I hate GUI installers - part of the reason I came to Gentoo in the first place. When this installer was first mooted I swore off it.
Bugger it, I'll stick to the old way, and others can help the rush of new users.

BillyBoy · Post by **BillyBoy** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 6:57 pm

Same experience here at work with one of my developers. He's got several distros on his laptop and the GUI install fried his table. And all because I have been extolling the virtues of Gentoo to him for months!!

todd1814 · Post by **todd1814** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:39 pm

cvweiss wrote:I'm not looking for help - just sharing my experience with a Gentoo install - it wiping out my home partition with everything I had on there. Ok, yes I do have some backups, but that's not the point. If Gentoo is instructed not to modify any partitions, then why is it writing to the partition table?

I had a similar experience. After going through the install several times, I think I've found out when the installer does and does not update the partition table.

I put Gentoo on my second hard drive and intended to make it bootable. That would let me set the BIOS to boot from either the Windows XP drive or the Gentoo drive when I wanted. The second drive had an NTFS parition with a lot of data that I needed so I used partition magic to push it all the way to the end of the drive. Then I made the following at the beginning of that drive:

/dev/hdb5 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/hdb1 /boot ext3 noatime 1 2
/dev/hdb6 /usr ext3 noatime 0 3
/dev/hdb7 /var ext3 noatime 0 4
/dev/hdb8 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdb9 /home ext3 noatime 0 5

(and /dev/hdb10, which is an NTFS partition that I don't mount)

Some other notes: In reality, /boot is the first partition on the disk and is a primary partition. 5-9 are in an extended partition which is located directly next to /boot. Gentoo sees this as 5-9 instead of 2-6 for some reason.

Getting back to the installer. I partitioned and formatted (as ext3) using partition magic and only set the mount point in the Gentoo Installer. I didn't ask it to format the partitions. This worked fine, except that the installer failed later while installing sendmail. That wasn't related to the partitions.

I used the installer a second time but asked it to not only mount the partitions, but to format them. I figured there were a bunch of old files from the failed install that I might as well wipe out. I didn't make any changes to the partition table shown in the installer - I just asked it to format the partitions. In this case, the installer updated my partition table - creating the /boot partition but then failing to update the partition table correctly. I lost all of the remaining partitions and had to seek out a recovery tool in order to get my NTFS partition back.

After recovering, I tried the installer again and let it format the drives. Same result - it wiped out my partition table. After recovering a second time, I went back and did the install manually (command line).

Long story short - if you ask the installer to format your partitions then it'll update your partition table. You might as well say goodbye to anything else on your drive.

dmartinsca · Post by **dmartinsca** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:35 pm

i still can't believe they released this thing

cvweiss · Post by **cvweiss** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 9:46 pm

Bug 128169 has been filed for this problem.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128169

wolf31o2 · Post by **wolf31o2** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 10:19 pm

dmartinsca wrote:i still can't believe they released this thing

Maybe because after months of testing an two complete beta releases of the Installer LiveCD not a *single* person noticed this? Remember that we're all volunteers here, and we cannot possibly check for every possible scenario. The Installer has (had?) some problems with partitions being on disk out of order. The Help for the partitioning screen says as much, since it is a limitation of parted, being technically invalid as a partition table.

I do agree that formatting should have 0 effect on partitioning, and so does the Installer team, as they have broken it up into separate steps in the CVS version of the Installer.

agaffney · Post by **agaffney** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 12:58 am

cvweiss wrote:Bug 128169 has been filed for this problem.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128169

I'm quoting my reply to this bug here, so more people will hopefully see it:

Code: Select all

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 (the 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).

syg00 · Post by **syg00** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 3:58 am

Thanks for the feedback agaffney. All the devs do good work, and have to put up with us users ...

wolf31o2 wrote:Maybe because after months of testing an two complete beta releases of the Installer LiveCD not a *single* person noticed this? Remember that we're all volunteers here, and we cannot possibly check for every possible scenario.

Tough call - on everyone. I was less than inclined to use the GUI when it was first mooted. Didn't like the direction, but could live with it so long as I could still use the CLI - which I have done again recently.
If I was to test it (as a beta), it would have been on a (clean) stand-alone system. I suspect other may have thought likewise. Probably unlikely to find problems like those being discussed here.

humbletech99 · Post by **humbletech99** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 10:40 pm

heh, poetic justice for using a graphical installer on gentoo me thinks!

I actually tried it out in a vmware so no danger there, it seems to be okish but I still think it's a bad idea, we'll end up with even more gentoobies giving gentoo a worse rep....

Also, if they want to turn gentoo into fedora, then I'll go and use fedora instead, it's got yum, at least it's anaconda is much quicker to achieve the same thing. watching the installer emerging stuff is like watching paint dry, you don't even see the compiling occur.

I think a lot of people will realise that if gentoo becomes more like Fedora they'll go and use fedora instead, I would, or better I'll stick to Debian for everything.

Gentoo developers take note! we don't want fedora otherwise we wouldn't be here in the first place!

ps. nice avatar yabbadabbadont! always good to see a fellow fluxer....

agaffney · Post by **agaffney** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 10:53 pm

humbletech99 wrote:watching the installer emerging stuff is like watching paint dry, you don't even see the compiling occur.

You might want to take a look at that Output tab.

humbletech99 wrote:Gentoo developers take note! we don't want fedora otherwise we wouldn't be here in the first place!

Until Gentoo forces a bunch of dumb choices on the user and switches to RPM, you have no basis for that statement. The installer is here simply to make installing faster for experiences users, not easier for n00bs.

syg00 · Post by **syg00** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 11:13 pm

agaffney wrote:The installer is here simply to make installing faster for experiences users, not easier for n00bs.

I suspect this is diametrically opposed to the perception out in the wilds.

"Ooooh look - Gentoo has a gooey installer, let's go try it now it's user friendly".
Has to bring in a rush of new less experienced users IMHO. And fscking up their systems (with the new installer I mean) ain't likely to make them long-term proponents of Gentoo.

humbletech99 · Post by **humbletech99** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 2:57 am

agaffney wrote:
humbletech99 wrote:watching the installer emerging stuff is like watching paint dry, you don't even see the compiling occur.
You might want to take a look at that Output tab.

I didn't notice it in the text version of the installer, I'll try the graphical one again and have another look... to be honest I did pay all that much attention since it was the easy to use anaconda installer....

syg00 wrote:
agaffney wrote:The installer is here simply to make installing faster for experiences users, not easier for n00bs.
I suspect this is diametrically opposed to the perception out in the wilds.

I agree completely, this is not the general perception in the wild.

syg00 wrote:"Ooooh look - Gentoo has a gooey installer, let's go try it now it's user friendly".
Has to bring in a rush of new less experienced users IMHO. And fscking up their systems (with the new installer I mean) ain't likely to make them long-term proponents of Gentoo.

I think this is true and that ultimately the gui installer will do more harm than good, the users may end up thinking gentoo is more buggy than it really is and say gentoo is not a reliable distro. Even worse, if it works and we end up with more gentoobies, the rep of other people who use gentoo will decline, it's hard enough to defend gentoo in irc channels as it is. If we end up with people who either can't read or are too lazy to read the manual, it's gonna lower the average ability of the gentooer user base and lead to an increase in stupid questions like "what is a stage3" just because nobody will read the manual any more.

ColombianJoker · Post by **ColombianJoker** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 4:35 pm

I had this setup:

/dev/hda1 6GB FAT32
/dev/hda4 Extended
/dev/hda5 4GB Linux test (ext3)
/dev/hda6 64MB GentooBoot (ext2)
/dev/hda7 10GB GentooRoot (reiserfs)
/dev/hda8 10GB BeOS (0xeb) partition
/dev/hda9 512MB Linux Swap
/dev/hda10 ~40GB GentooHome (reiserfs)

The GUI destroyer gave me "error writing partition table" and erased my extended partition! I've never told it to change my partitioning setup

I hate this installer. Gentoo developers must return the x86 Universal setup.

humbletech99 · Post by **humbletech99** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 5:19 pm

indeed, I agree, down with the new installer, give us back our universal installer!

Maedhros · Post by **Maedhros** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 8:06 pm

Please keep the discussions about whether the installer is a good or a bad thing in this thread: [topic=421166]GLI. A step in the right direction ?[/topic]

Gentoo overwrites partition table... [Bug 128169]

Gentoo overwrites partition table... [Bug 128169]

Re: Gentoo overwrites partition table when instructed not to

It killed my partition table too!