[Parted-maintainers] Bug#379405: parted: bug-ACK + REQ for severity-raise + partition table images included

[Marc-Jano Knopp]

Package: parted
Version: 1.7.1-2.1
Followup-For: Bug #379405

I can fully acknowledge the existence of this bug. It seems to be
reproducible.

Furthermore, I think this bug may deserve a severity of "important",
as an only seemingly empty partition table might lead to severe data
loss, as the user, misled by the wrong output of parted, assumes the
partition to be empty and feels safe to manipulate it arbitrarily.


Setup
-----

* PII/400 (Tyan board with BX chipset, 640 MB non-ECC RAM)
* Adaptec ASC-29160 U160-SCSI hostadapter with two U2W-drives attached:
    /dev/sda - Seagate ST39173LC (9 GB), ID #9
    /dev/sdb - Quantum Viking VK4550J (4 GB, SUN labeled), ID #10
  Hostadapter firmware version 2.57.0
* Adaptec AHA-3940 dual channel SCSI hostadapter with nothing attached,
  firmware version 1.12
* System: Debian Etch


Symptom
-------

parted does not display the partition table of /dev/sdb, if unit is
"mb", "gb" or "tb" (the workaround mentioned in #369583 often, but
not always works). For units "b" and "kb", the partition table is
correctly shown. Examples:

Bytes:

  # parted /dev/sdb unit b print

  Disk /dev/sdb: 4293181951B
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
  Partition Table: msdos

  Number  Start        End          Size         Type     File system  Flags
   1      32256B       1011709439B  1011677184B  primary  ext3
   2      1011709440B  4285370879B  3273661440B  primary  ext3

  Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.


Megabytes:

  # parted /dev/sdb unit mb print

  Disk /dev/sdb: 4293MB
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
  Partition Table: msdos

  Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.
  

CHS geometry of both drives:

  # parted /dev/sda unit chs print

  Disk /dev/sda: 1106,243,40
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
  BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 1106,255,63.  Each cylinder is 8225kB.
  Partition Table: msdos
  [...]

  # parted /dev/sdb unit chs print

  Disk /dev/sdb: 521,242,9
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
  BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 521,255,63.  Each cylinder is 8225kB.
  Partition Table: msdos
  [...]

In case that the partition tables get misinterpreted by parted or
contains data that confuses it, I've attached the MBRs of both drives
to this bug report, created by

  dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.mbr bs=512 count=1  # and sdb, respectively

Besides the respective partition table, sda.mbr contains a GRUB, and
sdb.mbr either a LILO or GRUB boot loader.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-2-686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=de_DE at euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)

Versions of packages parted depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.3.6-15   GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libncurses5                   5.5-2      Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  libparted1.7-1                1.7.1-2.1  The GNU Parted disk partitioning s
ii  libreadline5                  5.1-7      GNU readline and history libraries

parted recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information
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