[Parted-maintainers] Bug#673042: parted: loose 'legacy BIOS bootable' flag on GPT disks

[Moritz Muehlenhoff]

severity 673042 grave
thanks

Hi Colin,

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 09:40:26AM +0200, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 07:03:44PM +0200, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
> > Parted currently does not handle GPT partition flags properly when
> > modifying a GPT. The most crucial flag that is lost is the 'legacy BIOS
> > bootable'. It is used by SYSLINUX to detect which partition the system
> > should be booted from, for example. Currently, any changes using parted
> > (or one of the tools that rely on parted e.g. gnome-disk-utility) will
> > make a system using SYSLINUX on GPT unbootable if the flag is not
> > manually re-added. Pretty annoying, to say the least.
> > 
> > Attached is a patch against the version of parted currently in squeeze.
> > It is made of three patches cherry-picked from upstream. Other GPT flags
> > are still not preserved, but at least the 'legacy BIOS bootable' is.
> > 
> > This patch fails on the version currently in sid due to some issues with
> > autoconf/automake stuff. I'd rather let you handle that, but the
> > backported patches apply cleanly and manually building the code showed
> > that they work as intended.
> > 
> > I think this issue is worth an update in the next stable point release.
> 
> Any news on this? Comments? Thing I should do?

I'm raising the severity to RC. This really should be fixed for Wheezy:

This bug led to unbootable systems with two systems at work; the BIOS 
implementations in these systems discarded the hard disk in total if the 
bootable flag was missing.

Cheers,
        Moritz