GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 688374
Issues with "free space" in the volume grid
Last modified: 2012-12-04 16:59:31 UTC
Created attachment 229028 [details] screenshot Trying to partition my new drive, and then realised I needed to create one of those tiny boot partitions. Deleted my /boot (partition 2), and now can't create a partition in the free space. Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 25.0GB 25.0GB ntfs 3 25.5GB 50.5GB 25.0GB ext4 4 50.5GB 52.5GB 2000MB linux-swap(v1) 5 52.5GB 256GB 204GB ext4
We don't show any "holes" smaller than 1MiB - for that you will have to use command-line tools...
Isn't that 500 megs between partition 1 and 3?
500 megs was the size of my boot partition...
Ah, right, IIRC it's something like 1% or 1MiB, whatever is biggest, let me find the code in question. As to fixing this, we can probably relax this but it's just moving the problem around ie. other users will file bugs saying "it's showing this annoying tiny blob free space".
Here's the code http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-disk-utility/tree/src/disks/gduvolumegrid.c#n1335 Retitling the bug since this is really about whether to display a hole as "free space" or not
I think the answer here is to have a Show all holes in partition tables [ OFF] item in the app menu (defaulting to OFF).
OK, I've been thinking more about this. Since we align to 1MiB, the right thing is to always show holes bigger than 1MiB. That fix is here http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-disk-utility/commit/?id=cda6de3d25955cda5c03d9e1a6eca2d6d79019cb and fixes the problem you report. This revealed a more serious problem with the Disks application (at least on master - I *think* 3.4.x and 3.6.x are OK). That, is, we (unintentionally) created free space in the "Add Partition" dialog. The fix for that is here http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-disk-utility/commit/?id=89f95c44aaf8f4343f98466ed9bb0df01502527f This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.