GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 707070
Update Help Manual with GPT flags, Force Cancel button, etc.
Last modified: 2013-09-18 16:48:07 UTC
Update the GParted Help Manual with items such as: - list of GPT partition flags - force cancel button introduced with v0.15.0 - grub2 recovery steps I am working on a patch for these updates.
Created attachment 254027 [details] [review] Update help manual patch v1 Hi Mike, Attached are a series of patches to update the GParted help manual. Many of these are straight forward changes, but when reviewing the fourth patch, the section near: <title>Fixing GRUB boot problem</title> looks a little weird because the diff interpreted the changes in an odd way. The diff seems to have thought that I was simply changing one listitem for another, when in fact this whole list section was pushed down further in the document. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Curtis
Hi Curtis, I have some interim comments. (1) Patch number 3 seems repetitive with the wording: "Cancel Operation ... might cause SEVERE file system damage ...". Would wording like the following be OK? To force the operations to stop, click Force Cancel. The application displays a warning dialog. Click Continue Operations to allow the roll back operations to complete, or click Cancel Operations to cancel the roll back operations. <!> Cancel Operations terminates the safe roll back of operations and might cause SEVERE file system damage and data loss. Your are advised to click Continue Operations to allow the roll back to complete. (2) Minor nit with patch number 4. Can '#' be used as the prompt character. '#' normally represents root, where as '$' normally represents non-root users. Probably update in "Running gparted from a Command Line" too. Patches 1 & 2 are OK. I'd still like to do some recovery testing before passing final judgement on patch number 4. Thanks, Mike
Created attachment 254354 [details] [review] Update help manual patch v2 Hi Mike, Thank you for your excellent suggestions to improve the help manual. I have included your suggestions and some additional changes as noted below. Version 2 of the update help manual patch includes the following changes: Patch 1: Add diag flag to help manual and update manual metadata - Change "0.16.x" to "0.16.2" - Change revision history date from "June 2013" to "September 2013" - Remove trailing white space from revision history Patch 2: Add list of gpt flags to help manual - Change "GRUB2" to "GRUB 2" to align with later usage (originally I made this change in patch 4) Patch 3: Add changes for Force Cancel button to help manual - Add the changes suggested in (1) of comment #2. - Remove white space in "Force Cancel" section Patch 4: Add restoring GRUB 2 to help manual - Change to the "#" instead of "$" prompt as suggested in (2) of comment #2. - Did this in both GRUB 2 and GRUB Legacy sections Thanks, Curtis
Hi Mike, I've been doing some more testing with restoring GRUB 2. Not all of my tests have resulted in fully restored automatic boot, specifically with Fedora 19. SUCCESSFUL TEST --------------- My test with restoring a mythbuntu 12.04 image into a virtual machine worked by using the new steps in the help manual patch (comment #3). The original installation did not have a separate /boot partition. After performing the steps, mythbuntu 12.04 automatically booted correctly. NOT FULLY SUCCESSFUL TEST ------------------------- I build a VM using Fedora 19, and msdos partition table and standard partitions (no LVM). I placed /boot in a partition separate from /. To simulate broken boot, I hexedited /dev/sda and zeroed out part 1 of the boot code [000h to 0D9h]. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record Upon restarting the VM, Fedora 19 failed to boot, which is as expected. Next I used the new steps in the help manual patch (comment #3) to restore the GRUB 2 boot loader (using the GParted Live 0.16.1-1-486 image). Upon restarting the VM, I was placed at the "grub>" prompt. This was not what I expected. As such I am researching further to determine where the problem lies with my GRUB 2 restore steps. Curtis
Created attachment 254609 [details] [review] Update help manual patch v3 Hi Mike, Wow, it looks like I significantly underestimated the steps for restoring GRUB 2. After successfully testing restores with ubuntu, I incorrectly assumed that the same would work for other GNU/Linux distros. This does not seem to be the case. For example, the Fedora site lists the following steps: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Installation_Guide/ap-rescuemode.html#s2-rescuemode-boot-reinstall-bootloader Rather than hold up the GParted 0.16.2 release for the GRUB 2 steps, I have removed these from the patch. The original 3 parts of the patch are unchanged from version 2. Please review this new patch which excludes the GRUB 2 restore steps. Thanks, Curtis
The following information is just for notes regarding restoring GRUB 2 on Fedora 19. For this example the partitions as originally installed were: /boot on /dev/sda1 ext4 swap on /dev/sda2 linux-swap / on /dev/sda3 ext4 Steps to restore GRUB2 on Fedora 19 1. mkdir /tmp/mydir 2. mount /dev/sda3 /tmp/mydir 3. mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/mydir/boot 4. mount --bind /dev /tmp/mydir/dev 5. mount --bind /proc /tmp/mydir/proc 6. mount --bind /sys /tmp/mydir/sys 7. chroot /tmp/mydir 8. grub2-install /dev/sda By using the above steps and then restarting my Fedora 19 VM, Fedora 19 booted as expected. What I have learned is that even the name of the grub-install command is not consistent across GNU/Linux distributions. grub-install is used on Debian/Ubuntu grub2-install is used on Fedora Based on these distro discrepancies with GRUB 2, it might be best to omit any GRUB 2 restoration steps from the GParted Manual.
Hi Curtis, The changes from comment #5 have been committed to GParted upstream. commits are: Add diag flag to help manual and update manual metadata (#707070) https://git.gnome.org/browse/gparted/commit/?id=71998a5013db46be6f6138bd765b370ea2e2f981 Add list of gpt flags to help manual (#707070) https://git.gnome.org/browse/gparted/commit/?id=13ba466154fc769b63c1d5d502f13eb0229ef07a Add changes for Force Cancel button to help manual (#707070) https://git.gnome.org/browse/gparted/commit/?id=5e11bae44f66f93f5617b3d61ec1f024dad33e07 Thanks, Mike
The patches to address this report have been included in GParted 0.16.2 released on September 18, 2013.