bugs, bugs, bugs

[Petr Slansky]

Hello,

I used gparted to move my partitions from 80GB disk to 160GB disk. I am
disappointed with the result. I used the latest version of gparted LiveCD.

1) bootloader in MBR was not transfered, I was not able to boot the system on
my new disk (I fixed this with grub on floppy disk later)

2) No support for transfer of FreeBSD partition. It was marked as unknown and
bye, bye. I created manually partition of the same size and used "dd" command
to transfer data from one disk to other. It worked.

3) I resized some partition (make them bigger but I think it doesn't work for
FAT32 partition, I don't see that I have more space on my new disk; partition
is bigger but file system was not resized).

4) I miss command to "clone" partition in gparted. I can copy and paste only
but it is overhead, it takes a lot of time. I wanted to allocate space for
partition but I was not interested in coping data in one partition. I can
manually create new partition but I have to enter numbers from keyboard.

5) I cannot select several partitions at once in gparted and do complex move
in one step (copy&paste). I have to do job step by step, copy one partition
after another. When you copy data from one disk to another, it is not "easy";
you have to switch between devices, etc.

6) ignores disk UIDs. Modern Linux distributions use UIDs in /etc/fstab; like
Ubuntu. When I moved swap from one disk to other with gparted, I think that
UID changed. Is it possible? I moved 512MB swap to new disk and changed size
to 2GB. When I boot to the Linux on the new disk, swap was not mounted. I
changed UUId in /etc/fstab to fix this problem. I am not sure about this step,
there is a small change that I created swap on new disk from scratch; in that
case it is OK that new UID was assigned. I moved too many partitions and I am
not sure now...

7) parted and gparted reports partitions on the new disk like no change was
done. But I use new disk, fdisk reports it fine, I can boot from it but
gparted and parted still reports that it is only one big partition! What is
source of this information? It is funny, disk partitions were created with
parted (parted listing is wrong):

# parted -v
parted (GNU parted) 1.8.6
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software.  You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by
<http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/browser/AUTHORS>.

# parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA ST3160021A (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 160GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number  Start  End    Size   File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  160GB  160GB  fat16             

Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.             

# fdisk -v
fdisk (util-linux-ng 2.13)

# fdisk -l /dev/sda 

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000000a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1275    10241406    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2   *        1276        2004     5855692+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2005        2733     5855692+  a5  FreeBSD
/dev/sda4            2734       19457   134335530    5  Extended
/dev/sda5   *        2734        2745       96358+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            2746        3006     2096451   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7            3007        3863     6883821   83  Linux
/dev/sda8            3864        8962    40957686   83  Linux
/dev/sda9            8963       17904    71826583+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10          17905       19457    12474441   83  Linux

# sfdisk -l /dev/sda 

Disk /dev/sda: 19457 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1          0+   1274    1275-  10241406    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2   *   1275    2003     729    5855692+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3       2004    2732     729    5855692+  a5  FreeBSD
/dev/sda4       2733   19456   16724  134335530    5  Extended
/dev/sda5   *   2733+   2744      12-     96358+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6       2745+   3005     261-   2096451   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7       3006+   3862     857-   6883821   83  Linux
/dev/sda8       3863+   8961    5099-  40957686   83  Linux
/dev/sda9       8962+  17903    8942-  71826583+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10     17904+  19456    1553-  12474441   83  Linux
/dev/sda11         0     598-    599-   4806951  
/dev/sda12       598+    728-    131-   1048576  

From my point of view, parted/gparted is dangerous tool. It looks in some
cases as it works but it doesn't.

With regards,
Petr
---------------------------------
  Petr Slansky, address@hidden