Bug 151783

I performed an installation of Beta4 on my test machine which contains a single IDE harddisk (20GB) with the following partition table:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         126     1012063+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda2             127        1301     9438187+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda3            1302        1981     5462100   83  Linux
/dev/hda4   *        1982        2434     3638722+  83  Linux
/dev/hda5             127         596     3775243+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6             597        1301     5662881   83  Linux

I'd say it's not to unusual, a swap partition at the beginning and several logical Linux partitions in an extended partition.

Now, as can be seen in the screenshot, YaST's default proposal for the partitioning is very unhappy, as it only detects the swap partition correctly and discards the rest - no proposal for deletion/reuse whatsoever. As a result of this, there is no proposal for the boot configuration (because of the missing /boot partition) which would have to be performed manually. This compromises the usability however, as inexperienced users might have trouble in doing so and I can impress that it might not work with other more regular systems (maby with an windows-installation), too.

We had several reports about unhappy partitioning proposals lately, as YaST always seems to choose the last found disk and prefers SCSI-disks over IDE even if the SCSI device is attached externally via a hotplugging-port (...).

I will attach a screenshot of the installation summary as well as the YaST logs. I'm assigning this to Thomas because the trouble appears to be with the partitioner. I mention that I performed the installation in safe mode, because the CD-Drive has trouble with DMA. I could not find any critical messages in the kernel log anyway, so I see no connection here. I'm declaring this as `major' because of the usability issue.

Thomas: If you require more information about this system, feel free to ask me. If required, physical access is possible, too.