Gentoo 2006.1 installer kills partition table

Message

white-eagle · Post by **white-eagle** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 8:33 am

Hello

I tried to install Gentoo 2006.1 yesterday evening, with the gui-installer, on the partition-tab I just set the mountpoints, and don't select the format option.

Right after starting the installation, the installer crashes during accessing the partition table, and kills it.

Afterwards I had to rescue the partition table with parted, due to the fact i had no dump of the partitiontable

Why is the installer accessing partition table when i don't change the disk layout.

Performing the same steps with 2006.0 two days ago will work fine, but i need the newest gcc and libc 2.4 so i decided to reinstall the system with 2006.1 instead of performing the update steps, and recompile nearly everything.

OK, i won't leave gentoo, but i'm very upset of the 2006.1 installer, and next time I will install it by hand, as always.

H*** s***
here is some information i should have had earlier http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-493803.html

yabbadabbadont wrote:If the GLI (gentoo linux installer) in this release is the same as the one in 2006.0, then you would be better off following the instructions for a manual stage3 install. You can use the same CD for this, just open up a terminal window (or three) and follow the installation guide.

The 2006.0 installer had a nasty habit of occasionally destroying all of the existing partitions on a drive, even when told not to... be sure you have full backups if you use the installer.

white-eagle

dom_cyrus · Post by **dom_cyrus** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 8:06 am

Hey there, I had exactly the same problem!!!! ITS REALLY VERY ANOYING, GRRR. Can you tell me how you managed to restore your partinion table?

Thanks

pressenter · Post by **pressenter** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 8:19 am

The problem is rather old and exists since the first version of gui installer. The olny thing you can do is create partitions before installing and not use the build-in partitioning application.

lindmik · Post by **lindmik** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 8:28 am

dom_cyrus wrote:Hey there, I had exactly the same problem!!!! ITS REALLY VERY ANOYING, GRRR. Can you tell me how you managed to restore your partinion table?

Thanks

This happened to me a year ago.

Use gpart to restore the partition table.

kim_asplund · Post by **kim_asplund** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 10:24 am

I had a similar problem... Had 4 partititions and one of them was just created not formated or anything, so i det the mount points on /, /boot and swap and left one wo mountpoint as it did not have a fs. the pore installer was unable to live with the knowledge of not being able to identifye the unformated partitition "of unknown format" that it failed completley. oh and the other partititions was formated before and marked as to be formated by the installer.

Dabble · Post by **Dabble** » Sun Sep 03, 2006 5:08 pm

Yep, lost my /home an hour ago, at the same step... However, no mortgages on that one...

CosminG · Post by **CosminG** » Sun Sep 03, 2006 6:15 pm

my /home stayed intact after 2 instalation of gentoo 2006.1 one amd64 and one x86, both home and / partitions are reiser and I did format only the /, so I do not get it, why in my case was ok?

jmbsvicetto · Post by **jmbsvicetto** » Sun Sep 03, 2006 6:56 pm

Those of you having the partitioning problems with the live-cd, should include more detailed informaton if you want to help solving them.
You should also open a bug in Bugzilla including the /var/log/install.log.failed and /tmp/installprofile.xml files.

nabla² · Post by **nabla²** » Mon Sep 04, 2006 10:34 am

Some problem here

If this error was already detected in 2006.0 I would be quite dissapointed. Sorry no logs here as this was my smallest problem and I did not think of it, sry... However I can describe it: Everything partionated manually using fdisk and I put the filesystem on it manually as well:
1 Windows XP
2 boot
3 swap
4 extended with the home, var, tmp, portage, distfiles, home on seperate logical partition.

I used the installer to set the mount points (did not delete, change, format...). Then I started the installation and IIRC the error was: "Could not resize /dev/hda1" which is Windows. But it did not have to resize it (or I made a mistake I am not aware of).

Mandor · Post by **Mandor** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 2:52 pm

Just to get counted - I join the team. 2006.1 installer destroyed my partition table after just setting mount points . Now I have a huge 136G swap and lots of free space. Too bad it has been known for long and there is not even a notice.

onlinepancakes · Post by **onlinepancakes** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 9:51 pm

Why don't you guys just update the installer on the cd and give the snapshot version a try? Thats what I had to do on the 2006.1 cd because the installer version that came with 2006.1 did not work =/

Code: Select all

/opt/installer/misc/updategtkfe

As root in a terminal..

GarrettW · Post by **GarrettW** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 10:53 pm

and it does work after the update? no bugs??

JanisB · Post by **JanisB** » Wed Sep 20, 2006 4:34 pm

Code: Select all

GLI: September 20 2006 18:44:09 - Gentoo Linux Installer version 0.4.1
GLI: September 20 2006 18:44:09 - Setting root password.
GLI: September 20 2006 18:44:09 - Livecd root password set.
GLI: September 20 2006 18:44:11 - Portmap started.
GLI: September 20 2006 18:44:11 - Completed pre_install steps
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - partition(): Processing /dev/hda...
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   Partition 3 has origminor 3...saving start sector 10233405 and end sector 156280319
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   Partition 6 has origminor 6...saving start sector 30716343 and end sector 156280319
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): Deleting partitions that aren't being resized
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   Deleting old minor 6 to be recreated later
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No match in new layout for old minor 5...deleting
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): logicals for extended part 3: [5, 6]
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): newminor is 5
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): newminor is 6
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No logical partitions are being resized...deleting extended
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No match in new layout for old minor 2...deleting
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No match in new layout for old minor 1...deleting
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - _partition_resize_step(): Resizing partitions
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - _partition_recreate_step(): Recreating partitions
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Drive has 156301488 sectors
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Partition 1 has 59MB
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Start sector calculated to be 0
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     End sector calculated to be 120832
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Adding primary partition 1 from 0 to 120832
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Partition 2 has 4937MB
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Old start sector 96390 retrieved
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Retrieved start sector is not the same as the calculated next start sector (usually not an issue)
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Old end sector 10233404 retrieved
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Adding primary partition 2 from 96390 to 10233404
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - This is a bad thing. An exception occured outside of the normal install errors. The error was: 'Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.'
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - Traceback (most recent call last):
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - File "/opt/installer/GLIClientController.py", line 197, in run
    self._install_steps[self._install_step]['function']()
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - File "/opt/installer/templates/x86ArchitectureTemplate.py", line 461, in partition
    self._partition_recreate_step(parted_disk, newparts)
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - File "/opt/installer/templates/x86ArchitectureTemplate.py", line 313, in _partition_recreate_step
    self._add_partition(parted_disk, start, end, "primary", newpart['type'], strict_start=strict_start, strict_end=strict_end)
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - File "/opt/installer/templates/x86ArchitectureTemplate.py", line 81, in _add_partition
    disk.add_partition(newpart, constraint)
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - error: Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.

HDD: 80GB.

Expected: 60GB - NTFS Backup data, 50MB /boot, 10 GB /opt, 1GB SWAP, all other - /.
Result: 80 GB RAW partition.

Question - how i can recreate/restore/repair FileAllocationTable for HDD WITHOUT backup deletion?
Now i am from 2006.1 Live-CD and i haven't any free 80GB HDD with Windows to use FILERECOVERY or someth. for win*.

[edit]I've changed the code block to make it legible. Instead of using a small font please put the code inside code tags in the future. -- Jorge (jmbsvicetto)[/edit]

nixnut · Post by **nixnut** » Wed Sep 20, 2006 6:43 pm

merged above post here.

madisonicus · Post by **madisonicus** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 4:54 am

The GUI installer on 2006.1 live CD also failed to properly rewrite my partition table. To restore it, I used a program called testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) which examines the files on your HDD and guesses (very well in my case) as to the original partition table. I know testdisk is on the Knoppix disk. I can't recall whether it is also present on the Gentoo livecd.

The testdisk wiki is fairly thorough, and the program itself is pretty self-explanatory.

I wish I had paid more attention to the errors that resulted in the deletion of my partition tables. If I have some spare time I will try to recreate the problem and put something into bugzilla.

CLI ftw!

Cheers.

OgRo · Post by **OgRo** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 5:58 am

hey guys.

I didn't try GLI yet (but I might in a few months) but a friend of mine did. He is a windows user that wants to learn some things about gentoo.

he has an asus MOBO with ICH8/R controller, which is not supported by linux yet (at least not officially yet on the stable gentoo-sources) and so we decided to install his system on another SATA driver outside his RAID set.

here is the think: after he tryed GLI and it felt into the know "set root password bug on amd64 platforms" bug he decided to install by hand.

he is pretty sure he worked on the right drive and I belive he is right 'cuz he is not a nOOb (well, maybe a linux noob but not a computer noob) and I helped him through the steps.

after installing grub (and grub recognized the reiserfs partition and we did put it into the SATA drive's MBR, not into the raid set) we decided to boot into windows to make sure everything was fine.

but it didn't work. the bios couldn't find the windows boot.

he loaded his windows vista install and it detected his raid ser as blank space.

I know there's no much information here but a few clarifications could be made by our beloved gurus.

is it possible GLI simply destroied his data without even asking? (no, he didn't click on the "clear partitions" even once but he did click on ""recommended layout" while his sata drive was selected).

any tips would be higly apreciated.

thx in advantage

EDIT; sry about the duplicated topic. I looked for it but I didn't find anything earlier.

jmbsvicetto · Post by **jmbsvicetto** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 6:07 pm

Hi

JanisB wrote:

Code: Select all

GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - partition(): Processing /dev/hda...
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   Partition 3 has origminor 3...saving start sector 10233405 and end sector 156280319
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   Partition 6 has origminor 6...saving start sector 30716343 and end sector 156280319
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): Deleting partitions that aren't being resized
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   Deleting old minor 6 to be recreated later
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No match in new layout for old minor 5...deleting
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): logicals for extended part 3: [5, 6]
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): newminor is 5
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 - _partition_delete_step(): newminor is 6
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No logical partitions are being resized...deleting extended
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No match in new layout for old minor 2...deleting
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:13 -   No match in new layout for old minor 1...deleting
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - _partition_resize_step(): Resizing partitions
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - _partition_recreate_step(): Recreating partitions
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Drive has 156301488 sectors
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Partition 1 has 59MB
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Start sector calculated to be 0
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     End sector calculated to be 120832
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Adding primary partition 1 from 0 to 120832
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Partition 2 has 4937MB
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Old start sector 96390 retrieved
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Retrieved start sector is not the same as the calculated next start sector (usually not an issue)
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -     Old end sector 10233404 retrieved
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 -   Adding primary partition 2 from 96390 to 10233404
GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - This is a bad thing. An exception occured outside of the normal install errors. The error was: 'Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.'

GLI: September 20 2006 18:48:14 - error: Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.

The log has some worrying data. Did you opted for manually partition the disk? The last error is self-explanatory.

OgRo · Post by **OgRo** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:39 pm

madisonicus wrote:The GUI installer on 2006.1 live CD also failed to properly rewrite my partition table. To restore it, I used a program called testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) which examines the files on your HDD and guesses (very well in my case) as to the original partition table. I know testdisk is on the Knoppix disk. I can't recall whether it is also present on the Gentoo livecd.

The testdisk wiki is fairly thorough, and the program itself is pretty self-explanatory.

I wish I had paid more attention to the errors that resulted in the deletion of my partition tables. If I have some spare time I will try to recreate the problem and put something into bugzilla.

CLI ftw!

Cheers.

thx for the tip

he is gonna try it.

I'll tell you guys if it works.

and, gentoo devs: why have you released a buggy liveDVD without a huge warning in it? (in it, not the docs. windows users aren't used to reading manuals and howto's)

lxnay · Post by **lxnay** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 3:01 pm

I said that, but no one believed me... sorry.
I think that we should work together instead, I have ported anaconda on gentoo without having all the redhat fuss installed (not like the one from VLOS). Why not completely reconsider what GLI is?
Porting GLI code to anaconda (they both use python) is not hard at all.

digitalfrost · Post by **digitalfrost** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 12:01 pm

Thanks very much guys, I just killed my laptop's partition table this night and I was not able to restore my windows partition with testdisk (which was the largest with the most important data on...(yeah right I should have a backup...

)). I bought a new 250GB harddrive to create a clone of my laptop's harddisk and will then try to restore the data lateron

I think I'm not gonna use the Gentoo installer for a loooong time, or maybe I'll just stay away from Gentoo altogether.

jmbsvicetto · Post by **jmbsvicetto** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 2:26 pm

digitalfrost,

I'm sorry to hear that your partition table was killed.
Can you help to diagnose your issue so that it can be solved? Please follow my above post, open a bug on this and include the required info.

digitalfrost · Post by **digitalfrost** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 3:59 pm

I'm sorry but I wasn't so clever as to save the logfile somewhere. I tought well alright, install failed, so let's boot windows and try again tomorrow...

Oh I was so wrong

.
The disk used to be partitioned as follows (all primay):
64MB /boot
512MB swap
45GB Windows
10GB Apple HFS

I wanted to format the apple partition with ext3 and mount it as / ... Testdisk was able to restore all my partitions except the Windows one which is now only 30GB, doesn't boot anymore (altough the bootloader is alright I think - checked with disk editor), and I can't even access it with Testdisk. Currently I am doing a dd to clone the HD, then I will try to use GetDataBack for NTFS...wish me luck.

Ruzgfpegk · Post by **Ruzgfpegk** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 8:34 pm

It happened to me yesterday, and I was able to recover the partition table with TestDisk.
Sorry, I didn't think about saving the log, but I saved, before the error, a copy of the XML file made by the graphical installer.
The problem occured on /dev/sda, after creating two partitions (swap (sda5) and / (sda6)) in the "free" space before sda7, at the beginning of the extended partition.
I think that the "1024" value given for sda5's size messed things up, as I never could create a 1024MB partition here.
Creating a "new first logical partition" could have confused the installer, too.
I don't understand the resized="True" for sda1, because I didn't resize it at all.

Here is the "partitions" section :

Code: Select all

<partitions>
	<device devnode="/dev/hda" disklabel="msdos">
		<partition format="False" mb="113443" minor="1.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="defaults" mountpoint="/winsys" origminor="1" resized="False" type="ntfs"/>
		<partition format="False" mb="1027" minor="2.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="" mountpoint="" origminor="2" resized="False" type="ntfs"/>
	</device>
	<device devnode="/dev/sda" disklabel="msdos">
		<partition format="False" mb="58" minor="1.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="defaults" mountpoint="/boot" origminor="1" resized="True" type="ext2"/>
		<partition format="False" mb="286107" minor="2.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="" mountpoint="" origminor="2" resized="False" type="extended"/>
		<partition format="True" mb="1024" minor="5.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="" mountpoint="" origminor="0" resized="False" type="linux-swap"/>
		<partition format="True" mb="97632" minor="6.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="noatime" mountpoint="/" origminor="0" resized="False" type="reiserfs"/>
		<partition format="False" mb="1027" minor="7.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="" mountpoint="" origminor="5" resized="False" type="ntfs"/>
		<partition format="False" mb="61443" minor="8.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="defaults" mountpoint="/data" origminor="6" resized="False" type="fat32"/>
		<partition format="False" mb="73790" minor="9.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="defaults" mountpoint="/games" origminor="7" resized="False" type="fat32"/>
		<partition format="False" mb="51207" minor="10.0" mkfsopts="" mountopts="defaults" mountpoint="/oldwin" origminor="8" resized="False" type="ntfs"/>
	</device>
</partitions>

Knowing that many users have had this issue during the last weeks, why isn't this "bug" mentioned in the download section ?

bwakkie · Post by **bwakkie** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 9:04 pm

A few month agoo I had this very same problem too. The advice then was (and is I guess) using the commandline installer.
It gave me a big problem as I didn't have the correct cd with the commandline installed. So I had to go through some steps to get me the correct installer cd.
In the 2006.1 live cd the commandline installer is given too.

I would like to suggest to remove the GUI installer till this problem is fixed.

onlinepancakes · Post by **onlinepancakes** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 10:10 pm

bwakkie wrote:
I would like to suggest to remove the GUI installer till this problem is fixed.

Iv used the GUI installer 5 times on different machines and had 0 issues like this. Most likely reason why is because I don't use the GUI installer that comes included on the CD, for I do as the wiki says, if you have issues with it, upgrade the installer on the CD, and thats what I do.

Gentoo 2006.1 installer kills partition table

Gentoo 2006.1 installer kills partition table

GLI killed my HDD(partitions went away) :/

can GLI erase all partitions without asking?

Re: GLI killed my HDD(partitions went away) :/