[Parted-maintainers] Bug#549331: Problem reloading extended partitions

[Anthony L. Awtrey]

Okay, I was off the mark slightly. My issue is a bit more subtle than 
the Red Hat bug. It appears that the issue is actually tied to the 
partition scheme present on the drive.

If I start a Debian install with this partition layout on an 80GB drive:

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b26f4

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         852     6843658+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2             853        1183     2658757+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda3            1184        9729    68645745    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            1184        9729    68645713+  83  Linux

Which parted-server sees like this:

1 32256-7007938559         7007906304 primary ext3       /dev/sda1
2 7007938560-9730506239    2722567680 primary linux-swap /dev/sda2
5 9730538496-80023749119  70293210624 logical ext3       /dev/sda5

And then my preseed installer tries to do this:

1 32256-10240473599       10240441344 primary ext3       /dev/sda1
2 10240473600-12954815999  2714342400 primary linux-swap /dev/sda2
3 12954816000-80023749119 67068933120 primary ext3       /dev/sda3

Then the command_commit() fails with:

"Error informing the kernel about modifications to partition /dev/sda1 
-- Device or resource busy.  This means Linux won't know about any 
changes you made to /dev/sda1 until you reboot -- so you shouldn't mount 
it or use it in any way before rebooting."

The commit fails on /dev/sda1, so I can only assume that the new larger 
/dev/sda1 appears to parted-server to overlap with the logical /dev/sda5 
which was seemingly not "removed" when the extended partition /dev/sda3 
was changed to an ext3 volume.

Does that make sense? I'm still digging through the logs and code. I'm 
attaching the parted log to this email in case it helps.

Tony
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