Salix Forums

When using Gparted from 13.1 xfce live (and no doubt in general), annoying messages keep popping up to say mounting each partition failed.

Unticking "Mount removable drives when hot plugged" in Removable Drives and Media under Settings stops this. I wish I'd discovered it before!

However, maybe this is a problem with Gparted. These partitions are *not* 'removable drives', after all. I'm not sure what hot plugging means, but no doubt this is the desired behaviour in that case.

It would also be nice if Gparted unmounted the partitions on the device automatically,as far as possible (ie not if you are pointing it at the device where Salix is running). As it is, I unmount them (and turn off swap) from console before running Gparted. I see you can do these actions under the Partition menu,but it looks as though it has to be one by one. is easier, and doesn't unmount anything that shouldn't be.

So my (hesitant) suggestion is to change that default automount setting; but maybe Gparted shouldn't be behaving like that.

That doesn't solve the problem entirely. If you create or modify some partitions, you will get those ugly messages.
The correct way to do it is :

1. Autodetect if a automounter is running
2. Disable it
3. Launch gparted
4. Re-run the automounter is there was one before

This should be put in a gparted wrapper script.
So far, nobody work on this, but maybe one of the Live team could take the responsability of developping this later...

JRD wrote:So far, nobody work on this, but maybe one of the Live team could take the responsability of developping this later...

If I remember correctly, Shador worked on something like that a few year ago for a LiveCD we did then.

Hm, so it isn't just me !

This kind of problem is very disconcerting for newbies, and annoying for anyone. I'm quite used to partitioning now, but because of the potential for damage, and because I don't do it nearly as often as comparably fundamental tasks, I still try and keep things as simple as possible. For that reason, I haven't got very far yet with command line tools, even though I imagine they are simpler to use once you're used to them.

The great attraction of GParted is its ease of use, so this is something of a blemish. It's worth thinking that for anyone who is really new to Linux, Gparted is the first thing they'll see after a live CD. When you consider that many people in that situation are going to want to dual boot with Windows, which is trickier than a straight Linux setup, any (even apparent) difficulty around partitioning constitutes a serious bottleneck.

Gparted did something else unnerving this time: I had an (empty) data partition on sda5, and Salix on sda6. I wanted to change the filesystem on sda5, and probably should have reformatted; but instead, I deleted the partition and recreated it as ext4. Gparted then reported it as sda6, with Salix renamed to sda5 - but still the rightmost partition on the drive. Lilosetup then wouldn't work, and I suspect the partition table had become faulty. Indeed, when I reinstalled Windows on sda1, Salix disappeared! I was easily able to fix it using parted, but it was an unnerving five minutes, because I had some data on the Salix partition I hadn't backed up - namely, my backup image of the Windows partition on sda1!

Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you back up properly, there is no reason to be at all nervous about altering the partitioning scheme.

Really, apart very simple tasks, I prefer to use gparted than command line tools to deal with partitions. Because it's easy to make mistakes, and you have to run a bunch of commands to achieve the final goal (on MBR, on partition, on filesystem, ...)

I just used gparted (in xfce live 13.1) and unmounted the partitions from within gparted, one by one, rather than just doing
... and didn't have the irritating problem mentioned above. I didn't see a way of doing this for all partitions instead of one by one, but then I didn't look very hard - I just wanted to test if there was the same behaviour, and it seems not. However, it would certainly be good if there were a (prominent) option within the GUI to unmount everything with one click. It never even occurred to me before not to do it in console