Re: ped_geometry_destroy() bug (parted 1.6.6)

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Laas Toom wrote:

> I was researching the backgrounds of different methods of partition
> recovery 

Please include also TestDisk and gpart.

        http://www.cgsecurity.org/?testdisk.html
        http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

Usually I recommend the above two to people because based on user
feedbacks they do the best job in general. Unfortunately from all the
three basically only TestDisk is maintained and developed. Due to lack of
developer resources Parted is quite dead for over a half year (no patch
integrations, bug fixes, etc).

> (in case of partition table loss, deletion, etc) for an
> article 

Will it be publicly available? ;)

> As i wanted to be sure ntfs is also recovered, but my Windows XP Home
> did not let me format a partition on this stick (not even to FAT), i
> had to hack my way: created a fat partition with mkfs.msdos to sda1
> and used MS convert to convert to ntfs. 

Just FYI, you can create NTFS on Linux also with mkntfs from the ntfsprogs
package. The only drawback is that it creates NT4 NTFS and you can't use
sparse files on them. But just for testing partition recovery is enough
because the filesystem signatures and the crucial metadata layouts needed
to do the recovery are the same.

> Then i deleted all partitions with fdisk, and wanted to recover them
> with parted's rescue command, but the following was printed out:
> 
> (parted) rescue
> Start? 0.016
> End? 11.468
> Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!
> Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!
> Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!
> Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!
> Error: Can't have the end before the start!
> You found a bug in GNU Parted.  Please email a bug report to address@hidden 
> containing the version (1.6.6), and the following message:
> 
> Assertion (geom != NULL) at geom.c:90 in function ped_geometry_destroy() 
> failed.
> Ignore/Cancel?

Do you have a 2.6 kernel? People report problems with those but usually
nobody has the time to care to fix them or add support. Let's hope it will
change in the future ... There were attempts to restart Parted
development/maintaince but they didn't get very far. Debian has a somewhat
patched Parted what fixes some issues and that's all so far, AFAIK.

        Szaka