Serious Data Loss -- Live CD Installer

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 08:37:39PM -0700, Billy Charlton wrote:
> - 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.

(1 what?)

> 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?

I desperately need anyone who suffers from this problem (not everyone -
I do resizing tests pretty regularly myself) NOT to reboot out of the
live CD, but to save copies of /var/log/installer/syslog and
/var/log/partman and to provide them in a bug report. There is
unfortunately very little I can do without the log files, since
partition tables and filesystems vary so radically.

At the moment, I would also appreciate general testing with current
daily builds (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/) rather than
Beta 2 or Flight CD 7. I've fixed a large number of partitioning issues
in Ubiquity over the last month or so, some of which could have had some
pretty unpredictable side effects, particularly if you ran the installer
more than once.

I need people not to follow up to existing likely-looking bug reports
with their problems, but to file fresh bug reports. I have a lot of
problems with multiple issues landing in single reports, which makes it
very difficult to keep track.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson (not working today, honest)           [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]