Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1062 mails)

[mantel@xxxxxxx (Hubert Mantel)]

Hi,

we finally found the "fdisk bug".

Symptom:
--------
When trying to do an installation from scratch, YaST crashes and leaves
the console in an unsane state, so that the <return> key does not work
anymore and the message "An error occurred during installation!" pops up
in a red window.

What triggers the bug:
----------------------
The error only occurs when doing an installation in english language _AND_
when there is free space on one of the harddisks (this means: not all
available space is used for partitions on the disk).

Technical explanation:
----------------------
YaST uses text files which can contain format strings. Here is the
offending text in german and english language:

german:
Auf der Platte  wurden 0 Megabyte ungenutzer Plattenbereich gefunden.

english:
There is 0 MB of free space on .

As you can see, the 0 and the  are swapped. C programmers know what
that means: As soon as YaST tries to display this specific text, it
crashes with a segmentation violation.

Workaround:
-----------
Workaround is to avoid display of this text. There are several
possibilities:

1. As soon as YaST starts, switch to console 2 and create your partitions
   by starting fdisk manually. After you have written the partition table
   and left fdisk, please reboot the system before continuing. On the
   second run, just don't partition your harddisk(s) with YaST but make
   sure you format all the newly created partitions.
2. Start a rescue system and modify you partition table(s) to your needs.
   Reboot and start a normal installation.
3. Create your partitions with another tool and only change the type in
   YaST.

A fixed YaST is currently being built. We stopped shipping of the broken
version. No other language besides english is affected by this bug (which
made it very hard for us to find, because nobody in Germany reported the
problem).

I'm very sorry about this inconvenience, and we will provide fixed disks
as fast as possible.
                                                                  -o)
    Hubert Mantel                                                 /\\
                                                                 _\_v
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