Bug 207878

Summary:	hard disk repartitioner fails
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2	Reporter:	Gerhard Heinzel <gh55>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Thomas Fehr <fehr>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Critical
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	gh55
Version:	Alpha 4
Target Milestone:	Alpha 5
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Beta-Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	Yast installation log

Description Gerhard Heinzel 2006-09-23 20:14:26 UTC

I want to install Linux on a new PC with 320 GB
disk which has a single Windows NTFS partition.
During install from 10.2 alpha 4 CD's, 
the installer suggests to shrink the Windows
partition to 100GB and split the rest into
3 Linux partitions. When I agree, it fails
with error code -1021.

After rebooting and examining the state I see
that is has shrunk the NTFS partition and then
stopped.

With the rescue system's ntfsresize and fdisk
I can do the remaining steps
manually (delete partition, remake smaller,
create Linux partitions), so there is nothing wrong
with those tools or the hardware.

Comment 1 Andreas Jaeger 2006-09-23 20:24:42 UTC

We need the YaST log files from the failure.  Can you get them?

Without them we do not really know what exactly happened :-(

Comment 2 Gerhard Heinzel 2006-09-23 20:44:57 UTC

Created attachment 99504 [details]
Yast installation log

In response to the question,
here are the logs. I doubt that they
are very useful, however, since the
bug occured during partitioning of the hard disk, and I cancalled the installation then and rebooted
the rescue system. Only after I fixed the partitions manually,
I restarted the installation and
I would expect that only then (after sucessful partitioning)
logfiles could have been written

Comment 3 Andreas Jaeger 2006-09-23 20:55:52 UTC

Yes, this will not help much.  We use a ram disk initially and even during that failure, the log files would be saved there - and those would be helpfull to nail down the problem.

Let's see whether somebody has an idea - otherwise we have to close this as CANTFIX (aka INVALID).

Comment 4 Gerhard Heinzel 2006-09-23 21:05:13 UTC

From my memory, the state of the hard disk
after I aborted YAST2 was similar to what
I achieved manually by running
ntfsresize -s 100G
i.e. there is only one partition /dev/sda1,
it claims the whole 320 GB but is only 100 GB
large. When at this stage I botted windows,
it also showed this situation.
None of the remaining steps that I did manually
with fdisk from the rescue system
- delete  /dev/sda1
- recreate /dev/sda1 with same starting sector and properties,
  but smaller size
- proceed to create more partitions
seem to have been done by Yast.

Comment 5 Thomas Fehr 2006-09-26 17:16:19 UTC

Since by chance I got a new desktop with Win XP on it these days, I was able 
to reproduce a problem, that comes up when ntfsresize claims the windows
filesystem being inconsistent. YaST2 did not handle this case correctly.

I fixed this now and added also a text to the proposal explaining why win fs 
resize is not possible. It seems to be not too rare that ntfs system volumes
come with an inconsistent ntfs (the machien I got was in such a state).
The problems went away when I booted win XP and forced it to check the
filesystems. Afterwards shrinking of the ntfs in YaST2 was successful.

If similar things should happen again, it is always important to save the log
files written to ramdisk before making a bug report.