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

[Matthew S. Harris]

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