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Bug 575745 - Crashes trying to format a USB stick with no existing filesystem
Crashes trying to format a USB stick with no existing filesystem
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: gnome-disk-utility
Classification: Core
Component: nautilus extension
unspecified
Other All
: High critical
: ---
Assigned To: gnome-disk-utility-maint
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2009-03-17 20:07 UTC by Adam Williamson
Modified: 2010-02-18 03:52 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Adam Williamson 2009-03-17 20:07:21 UTC
Please describe the problem:
The Nautilus extension will happily offer to format a USB stick with no existing filesystem, but then crashes.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Get a completely fresh unformatted USB stick, or do:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=8192 count=10000
fdisk /dev/sdb
(create a single partition, write partition table, and exit)
2. Re-plug the USB stick
3. Open computer:///
4. Right-click the USB stick and click 'format'
5. Select any filesystem and other options (doesn't matter)
6. Hit 'create' at the end of the options

Actual results:
The tool crashes.

Expected results:
The filesystem should be successfully created.

Does this happen every time?
Yes.

Other information:
Following the same procedure to create an unformatted stick and then formatting the partition with mkfs.ext3 or mkfs.vfat works perfectly well.

The same behaviour also occurs if you leave the zero'ed out USB stick with no partitions at all - i.e. run fdisk to 'fix' it from its zero'ed state, but just write the table without creating a single partition first. Nautilus will still offer to format the stick, and will fail as described above.

I did send in the crash report when this happened the first time, so it should be in the database. I am testing with the Fedora 11 live CD for the DeviceKit test day (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-03-17).
Comment 1 palfrey 2009-03-17 20:29:55 UTC
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug.
Without a stack trace from the crash it's very hard to determine what caused it.
Can you get us a stack trace? Please see http://live.gnome.org/GettingTraces for more information on how to do so. Thanks in advance!

We don't appear to have an earlier stack trace for gnome-disk-utility from you. Is it possible the report was submitted to Fedora instead? If so, do you have a URL for the bug report there?
Comment 2 Adam Williamson 2009-03-17 21:08:49 UTC
I recall the submission process definitely showed a gnome.org URL. I did actually hit the button that lets you examine the data in more detail, and it didn't contain a backtrace, only the .xsession-errors info. Which isn't normal, indeed.

Regardless, this is definitely reproducible using the steps indicated in the report.
Comment 3 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2009-03-17 23:10:06 UTC
This is a bug in Tomas' nautilus extension that we haven't yet merged into gnome-disk-utility (bug 575437). But I'll leave the bug open so Tomas can deal with it once his code has been merged.
Comment 4 Akhil Laddha 2009-12-11 06:07:11 UTC
Shall we close the bug now ?
Comment 5 Akhil Laddha 2010-02-18 03:52:21 UTC
Please feel free to reopen this bug if you face the problem any time. Thanks!