[parted-devel] Patch: Be more conservative about modifying the disk

[Matthew S. Harris]

Any more word on this patch?  It's purely a UI issue; you can't
automatically fix the problem in all cases, so we need to check with
the user before potentially doing damage.  I know you're bothered that
a user in this situation may have to tell Parted to ignore the
problem, but certainly that's better than blindly overwriting the
user's disk even when the user presses ctrl-c.

If you don't want to take the change, I won't press any more.
Obviously the situation doesn't happen often in real life or you would
have heard from more people by now.  I just don't want this fix to
fall through the cracks if it can save someone else from what I went
through.


Matthew

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 09:32, Matthew S. Harris <mharris312 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 02:47, Joel Granados <jgranado at redhat.com> wrote:
>> You have a point here.  What still bothers me is that the user will constantly have to tell parted.  "yes, I know that the gpt table is not where its suppose to be, ignore please"
>
> I don't have a problem with that at all.  Most users will never see
> the message.  I was in an apparently unusual situation (since nobody
> else has reported this problem in the past 18 months), and any user
> would be much happier saying "ignore, please" than digging into the
> internals of GPT and editing their copy of Parted.
>
>> I confess that I could not think of a good solution for this issue of the top of my head.  The only thing I could think of is to "fix" the position of the table without erasing the previous one.  But then you would have problems with the synchronization of the three.  You may also have an issue of overlapping lists.
>
> Yeah, there's no transparent fix you can apply here; if the other OS
> really sees the partition differently, any writing you do at the end
> of it could corrupt its data.  We just need to fix the UI so that the
> user doesn't get into the situation I was in: Parted says, "the
> primary GPT table is corrupt," I think "no, it's not, it's a bug in
> Parted, let me ctrl-c so Parted doesn't try to fix it" ... and then
> Parted does anyway.
>
> The situation is unfortunate, but I think this UI change really
> doesn't have a downside.
>
>
> Matthew
>