GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 582101
Can not copy ext4 partitions to another location
Last modified: 2009-11-25 19:45:34 UTC
Please describe the problem: Installed Ubuntu 9.04 on external. Made a slightly larger partition on internal. Went to external hit copy. Went to internal and the option to copy is grayed out. The reason I did this was the news that someone else had tried this and had this result. I have used gparted for this purpose before and the results have always been great. Steps to reproduce: 1. New install on partition of HDD 1 2. New partition on HDD 2 to move to 3. Try copy/paste Actual results: Option paste not available (grayed out) Expected results: Successful copy Does this happen every time? Yes Other information: I did try this with gparted from Ubuntu 8.10 which, of course saw the partitions as ext3. The options were all there but the paste failed right off.
I used gparted from another drive, different from either the original (to be copied) or the target (to be pasted to). The active gparted was on another Ubuntu 9.04 installation.
I am not sure that I understand this problem correctly. Are you trying to copy a partition and paste it into an already existing primary or logical partition? If this is the case, then this capability has been disabled as per the following request: http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=5355 If this is not the case, would be be able to provide more details such as the source partition size, type (primary or logical), and the destination free space, and if you were trying to paste outside or inside of an extended partition?
Being able to copy/paste/move one partition to another was one of the great advantages of using gParted over a number of other partition editors. I have done this with gParted on numerous occasions without any problems at all. If the purpose of disabling this ability was due to one user ( http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=5355 ) not paying attention to what he was doing, or any user for that matter, then I believe it to be a great injustice to the rest of us that have used the copy/paste ability to a great advantage. If you do not want to enable the copy/paste routine globally, then at least publish or let us know how to reenable it.
Thank you for your comments Robert. One can perform the equivalent of pasting into a partition by first deleting the partition and then pasting into the unallocated space. Is there some advantage, other than one less step, to be able to paste into an existing partition and hence wipe out it's contents? The code change that prevents pasting into an existing partition can be viewed in the git repository at: http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gparted/commit/?id=3836232cfbfddf5271294b9c4eb086327eb89fc1
Thank you very much for the quick response and the code changes. Without getting into great detail, time is very important to me when working on several systems at one time. And rather than having to perform that extra step, it's easier and quicker for me if I can flow thru a sequence of events in as few steps as possible. Would this be true had gParted always been with the change to have to delete the existing partition first?? More than likely not, as it would then have been a standard procedure in copying/moving partitions. But as it stands, it wasn't that way before. My philosophy is and has always been, 'if it works, don't try to fix it; if it doesn't work because of human error, change the human'. Thank you again for taking the time to respond and providing the answers.
The ability to paste into an existing partition was disabled in GParted version 0.4.0. This ability has been re-enabled along with a warning dialog that indicates the data in the existing partition will be lost if the copy and paste operation is applied. The code enhancement for this request has been committed to the git repository for inclusion in the next release of GParted (0.5.0.) The relevant git commit can be viewed at the following link: http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gparted/commit/?id=ef2fc4919cab87437f15bec93c6de5a80c2975dd Closing this bug.