Serious Data Loss -- Live CD Installer

[Billy Charlton]

Colin Watson wrote:
> 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?)
>
>   
I think it was -1 cylinder -- just a few megabytes.

>> 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.
>   
Yeah, I thought of this right *after* I rebooted. Unfortunately there 
was social pressure to get back to a workable state quickly since it 
wasn't my PC; if it had been my machine I might have been better about 
it.  :-(
> 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.
>   
<sigh> Well, I had just burned the latest nightly build onto a CD, but 
for some reason the CD was unbootable.  Instead of trying to re-burn the 
.iso, I just said "hey, I already have the beta 2 CD right here, let's 
just use that and then do online-update." 
> 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,
>
>   
Ok, filed.  https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/45597

I have a partition on my own machine without important data on it, and I 
am happy to try and reproduce this on my own machine.  I'm going to be 
out of town for a few days next week, but I do want to help. 

Cheers,
Billy