Partitioning-error during 6.06-install

[Henk Koster]

On Tue, 30 May 2006 12:17:29 +0200, Robert Spanjaard wrote:

> I Just tried to install 6.06 on my notebook, which had two partitions when
> I started: a Windows NTFS-partition of 72 GB with about 62 GB free, and a
> FAT32-partition (probably for recovery) of 1.9 GB.
> 
> When I got to the partitioner, I selected to edit the partitions manually:
> - Resize the Windows-partition to 15 GB (which would leave about 5 GB free
>   on that partition)
> - Use the free space for an ext3-partition of about 58 GB
> 
> Then I waited... GParted was happily squeezing the air out of Windows'
> lungs, and everything seemed to go just fine.
> But after a while, X server suddenly restarted. Or at least, that's what
> it looked like. The screen went blank, switched to text-mode, and after a
> while I got the GNOME startup-sequence again (panel, window-manager etc).
> Linux did _not_ restart completely, it was just X and everything in it
> AFAIK.
> 
> I restarted the installer (which had remembered my localisation- and
> usersettings) and got to the manual partitioning again. The
> Windows-partition was still reported as being 72 GB, but the used space
> went from 10GB to 67 GB.
> 
> I decided to reboot into Windows, and see what had happened to all my free
> space. After the partition-check, Windows booted, I opened explorer and...
> saw a partition of 15 GB!
> 
> So now, I have Windows reporting 15 GB with 5 GB free, and GParted
> reporting 72 GB, also with 5 GB free. How can I solve this problem?

There have been many problems with the way GParted is run inside the
Dapper liveCD installer. My advice is to do the partitioning and the
formatting with a filesystem (need not be ext3, I use jfs) manually
(with cfdisk, mkfs (mkswap)) when booted in any reliable Linux liveCD (I
use Knoppix). After rebooting the Dapper liveCD and starting the
installer, choose Manual editing of the partition table, but just accept
what you've done earlier (Forward), then assign the mount points AND 
check the reformat boxes. Dapper then installs OK from there on, at least
it did for me.