[Bug 42065] Re: installer: confusion about partition sizes (1000 vs. 1024 issue)

[Nehal Mistry]

I just encountered this with version 20.04. I created an ESP partition
for 259 MB in the installer, but shows as 247 MB in other partition
tools (gparted, fdisk, Windows 10). I didn't notice this until a few
days after installing Ubuntu. This is the main problem: it's not clear
that it deviates from the most common convention.

I understand cjwatson's point that it's not easy to simply change this.
But perhaps it's a much smaller change to notify the user somehow? My
recommendation would either be to display a message along the lines of
"1 MB shown here is equivalent to 1,000,000 bytes". It can be displayed
either at the top of the window, or a separate dialog right before in
the installer process. I think this would be very useful. If I saw this
message I would have partitioned using gparted instead to get the exact
layout that I wanted.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/42065

Title:
  installer: confusion about partition sizes (1000 vs. 1024 issue)

Status in partman-base package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  If I enter "64m" as the size of the partition to be created, it will
  correctly create a 64MB (MB=1024^2 bytes, "real MB") partition. But in
  the partition list it gets displayed as "65.8 MB" (MB=1000^2,
  "salesman MB"). This is confusing.

  Please use 1024-based sizes, since it's what administrators are used to and what resembles the internal structure (512Byte sectors, n-bit block addressing) best. 1000-based sizes are mostly a creation of "marketing experts" to make the devices seem larger than they really are.
  A note about this difference in the partition manager could inform novice users why their HD is smaller than expected.

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