[Parted-maintainers] Bug#569998: parted should be useful for extended parallel Win7 installations

[Ralph Ulrich]

Package: parted
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.8.8.git.2009.07.19-5
Severity: severe

Situation:
Since Vista there is no more a compatible way to partition your
harddisk. Win7 needs 1MB free space before first primary partition and 1
MB free space before every first logical disk. And it needs endings of
partitions at MB boundaries.

What happened to me NOT knowing this:

I did as usual:
1. Laptop recovery 12GB
2. Win7 starter 100 MB
3. Win7 ntfs 100GB
4. extended partition
/dev/sda5 swap 5GB
/dev/sda6 root 30GB
/dev/sda7 home 60GB
/dev/sda8 vfat 60GB
/dev/sda9 vfat 60GB
And a grub install into MBR

After some time we did using Win7 a format of /dev/sda9.
Since then the grub bootloader was not started any more. Even Samsung
recovery using F4 just after bios didn't work.

After using Ms fixmbr tools the Windows Computer-Partitioning-Tool shows
5 primary disks and three partitions residing in the extended partition!

Simple solution would be to install Linux using just a fourth primary
partition without any swap etc...

To be able to setup some more sophisticated Linux enironments parallel
with Win7 is there a way to setup using MB boundaries?
Is it a way in fdisk to change chs using some Win7 friendly values for
example?
Are there different mode of partitioning available?

This bug was tagged severe, for the most people don't know of this trap
and end up with an unbootable system!