Serious Data Loss -- Live CD Installer

[Morgan Collett]

On 5/19/06, Billy Charlton <billy at trigby.com> wrote:
> So I just attempted installing Dapper Beta 2 on my partner's PC.  Pretty
> normal HP PC with Windows XP.
>
> - Used Dapper Beta 2 - live CD
> - GUI Installer
> - Tried to resize /dev/hda1 to make room for a fresh install of Dapper
> - Clicked "next" after dragging resizer widget on partition.  The
> installer brought up a dialog box "Resizing Partition" which was
> immediately followed by dialog "Resizing Failed".  Now drive shows two
> partitions, both type "unknown", first partition size was original size
> - 1, 2nd partition size 1.
>
> Now machine won't boot Windows XP.  I've tried using fdisk from live cd
> to set partition type to HPFS/NTFS, resetting size to full disk size,
> but still says unbootable.
>
> a) Am I now in the doghouse, having hosed the PC?
> b) Is there any way to get XP back?
> c) Is there a known bug in the Live CD installer for resizing NTFS, or
> is this something new?
>
> Thanks... happy to provide a lot more info, please let me know what else
> is needed.  Hopefully my loss can help prevent this happening to other
> users?

Phew! Finally I find a duplicate of my own experience!

I used the Flight 7 Ubuntu LiveCD installer on my machine which had
Breezy installed in hda1 and swap on hda2/5. I had exactly the same
issue - I used the resizer widget to specify some free space to resize
hda1. It reported "Resizing failed" and dropped me out of the
installer. Unfortunately I rebooted without saving the installer logs
so I can't provide them.

Then while fdisk showed my hda1 partition as ext3, gparted showed it
as "unknown" and wouldn't let me do anything except reformat it. I
also couldn't mount the partition from the LiveCD. I spoke to Colin
Watson on IRC and he told me that gparted scans the partition contents
for the type and thus could not be finding an ext3 partition even
though it was labeled as ext3.

It appeared that the installer did try to create a new partition,
hda3, after the resize failed. This partition appeared in fdisk as
ext3 but with zero length.

I googled extensively and tried gpart, which couldn't find anything
where hda1 was - so I concluded that the partition was irretrievably
lost, and reformatted the drive. (I needed to install *something* to
get up and running again...)

Fortunately I did have a backup of some of my data from just before
installing...

I didn't file a bug yet because I couldn't really specify anything
useful (other than DATA LOSS!!!), but I don't think this is bug 40464
- I think it is different.

So, assuming this is the same bug, it's not resizing NTFS but resizing
generally which can toast the partition. And it's still broken in
Flight 7.

Morgan