Hardy Alpha 4 Wipes Out Other Partitons

Wierd. I did a df, which is of course after the Hardy Alpha 4 install:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 10072456 2371724 7189064 25% /
varrun 907712 208 907504 1% /var/run
varlock 907712 0 907712 0% /var/lock
udev 907712 68 907644 1% /dev
devshm 907712 12 907700 1% /dev/shm
lrm 907712 22416 885296 3% /lib/modules/2.6.24-5-generic/volatile
/dev/sda5 20161172 4115784 15021248 22% /home
/dev/sda3 18777460 176184 17647420 1% /media/hdb3
/dev/sda6 15116836 168696 14180236 2% /media/hdb6
/dev/sda7 14500068 167180 13596312 2% /media/hdb7
/dev/sdb1 1976492 378016 1498072 21% /media/casper-rw

Note that sda3 was an Xubuntu and sda6 was a Gutsy Alpha before the Hardy Alpha 4 install on sda1, should have been 20+% used, etc.

I tried an fdisk on sda3, which was a running Xubuntu, and got this wild report:

jerry@Compaq:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda3
[sudo] password for jerry:
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0xe4daca65.
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2375.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Looks to me like the partition table entry for sda3 is all screwed up.

Here's fdisk for sda6 which was a running Hardy Alpha:

jerry@Compaq:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda6
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x1e4834a6.
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1911.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

That one's all screwed up as well.

Now this entry, the df, the fdisk, and the install that started all this are all from the Hardy Alpha 4.

?

Jerry

I had a similar occurrence (Bug 188120) when installing Hardy build 20080131.2 on a dual boot Windows 2000/ OpenSuse10.3 on two disks, one with a single partition (Win2k) and one with 4 partitions (2xntfs, swap and root). All 5 partitions were screwed up. Windows install thought they were write protected and MSDOS fdisk would not recognise them at all. The only way I could recover them was with MaxBlast, by rebuilding the partitions from scratch. Even then, one partition reported 2Tb free space and one reported 0% free space but this corrected itself after loading data onto them and defragmenting.

Disaster for me also.
I use bootitng to manage two pata 200 GB drives with dozens of partitions and various operating systems.
My hobby since 2002. I've had many installations overwrite my MBR, but kubuntu-alpha-4-alternate CD also
wiped my partition table for one of the drives.
In my case the partition was already setup, the installation only had to format it.
I managed to undelete all but one partition using bootitng's undelete. That one contained Sayabon. It has taken me
three days to reinstall it. Cussin' all the time.

Also:
PLEASE Give us the option to NOT install grub, if "install to root partition" isn't available. PLEASE!

jerrylamos: I think I may know what this is, but I need log files from you to confirm. Could you please attach /var/log/installer/syslog and /var/log/installer/partman to this bug?

I believe this bug was fixed a while ago, and I apologize for it existing in the first place. We'll need the requested log files to know for sure, but since it's been a few months since requesting them I'm going to close the bug.

If at any point you are able to test the install again and the bug reappears, please reopen this report and attach /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman.

Thanks!

This bug as written has not happened to me again. I got two successive failures with Hardy Alpha 4. The Beta's and release code have not had this problem. I did lose partition contents on an install yesterday, however I was doing some resize & partition deletes of other partitions at the time, so I assume the whole partition table got re-written. Yes, my data was backed up.

Thanks for looking this problem.

Jerry