Resizing partition results in data loss

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Resizing an existing partition during an ubiquity install fails, resulting in severe, unrecoverable data loss.

System:

- Fairly standard PC (HP brand-name machine, Windows XP pre-installed, 80Gb HD, 1GB RAM, Pentium 4 2.4 GHz)
- Hard disk had two partitions, a small "system recovery" FAT32 partition from the manufacturer, and a 70Gb NTFS partition with Windows XP and user files.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Booted off live CD (Dapper Beta 2, PC Version) and ran ubiquity.

2. Chose "manual partitioning" because the default option, "resize existing HD" did not give enough UI feedback for me to feel comfortable resizing. Specifically, I couldn't see how full the existing partition was so I didn't know how much I could shrink it. From past experience I knew that the manual installer gave a nice UI which showed percent freespace.

3. From manual partitioning screen, I right-clicked the existing NTFS partition, and picked "Resize". The partition was about 50% full, so I dragged the bar to around the 75% mark so the freespace would be split evenly between the existing NTFS partition and the new partition.

4. The GUI was then very confusing, it showed a list of "actions" that would take place sometime later, and some free space. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to just click "next" or actually create a partition in the free space. I chose to right-click the free space and choose "New". The dialog that popped up had partition type set to "ext2" which I figured was wrong, and we set that to ext3 and clicked OK.

5. After clicking next (or was it forward), a dialog popped up saying "resizing..." but I don't remember the exact wording. It was quickly replaced by a "Failed" dialog whose wording I also don't remember.

6. At this point the installer showed two partitions where there used to just be the NTFS partition. Both were marked type "Unknown". The first was almost the original size of the existing partition, perhaps slightly smaller. The second was very small (I think 7Mb).

7. Sensing disaster, we panicked, cancelled, and rebooted the machine. Windows would not boot.

I spent the entire evening trying to recover the lost partition, using tools such as testdisk, gpart, ntfsresize. No tool could even recognize the partition as NTFS, even when I attempted to rewrite the partition table to its original contents. It's as if the partition was partially written overwritten in some catastrophic way, but I don't have a way to verify that.