KDE Partition Manager keeps crashing
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Registered Member 
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Hi,
I'm currently running KDE Neon 5.9.4 Developer Edition Stable. Since 12th April updates, KDE Partition Manager keeps crashing after password prompt. The strange thing is that after the crash it asks me to run Partition Manager without root privileges and it works, but obviously it's useless since I can do nothing without root privileges. Any ideas? |
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Short answer:
Graphical PartitionTable-Editors are generally not trustworthy. At least, they mostly lack good documentation. And they do not tell, what they do, exactly. Always use command line, if at all possible. $ mount | grep '/ ' /dev/sdb4 on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,nossd,space_cache,subvolid=257,subvol=/@) $ sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.1 Partition table scan: MBR: protective BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: present Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT. Disk /dev/sdb: 732558336 sectors, 2.7 TiB Logical sector size: 4096 bytes Disk identifier (GUID): 14D1485B-1976-4CE8-916F-B031FAC89E8B Partition table holds up to 128 entries First usable sector is 6, last usable sector is 732558330 Partitions will be aligned on 256-sector boundaries Total free space is 292028402 sectors (1.1 TiB) Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 256 128256 500.0 MiB EF00 ESP GrUB 2 128512 268563968 1024.0 GiB 8300 Debian BlockDevice 3 268564224 272758528 16.0 GiB 8200 Linux swap 4 272758784 406976511 512.0 GiB 8300 KDE neon BlockDevice 5 406976512 440530943 128.0 GiB A600 OpenBSD disklabel Even if there was no crash, I'd not recommend any graphical partitioner, if avoidable. |
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Registered Member
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Didn't know that. Then I'll use command line tools, at least for now.
Thanks. |
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Registered Member
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I don't know the reason of the crash (but you can check the logs of apt in that date to see what has been updated).
I have to answer about the graphical tools, because the comment before is unfair and untrue. Unfair for all the people working on tools which works. Untrue because they do work (the venerable graphical installer with partitioner of Mandrake Linux helped tons of time, and gparted too). If partitionmanager is not working for now (locally, in that environment), you can surely try gparted.
tosky, proud to be a member of KDE forums since 2008-Oct.
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It's not a question of fairness to the developers.
Those are my/Your data. They represent hours of life time. and big amounts of money. Sometimes, You can't use graphical interfaces (because they crash, for example). Or Your graphics driver is broken totally. Then You have to know the command line, anyway. If You are a consumer with easy reproduceable entertainment content (movies and music for the masses), then the risk is smaller. But business…? Lawyers? Banks? Hospitals? Every additional (graphical) layer on top of (non-graphical) functionality - every additional layer - is an additional, avoidable possible point-of-failure. There are lots of reason, to be grateful for the efforts of developers of graphical partitioners. If You lack partioning knowledge, go ahead and use them. These tools are made for You by friendly programmers. But when Your partitioning application CRASHES during partitioning: Kiss Your data GoodBye. If You answer: Well… make backups! Yes, but not everyone has them. Not everyone has them immediately available. And even if: They can take a very long time to restore. And Your employer, customer (or wife) is waiting… Why taking the risk, if it's avoidable in the first place? |
KDE Developer
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It needs to be recompiled after ABI break in kpmcore. Developer edition builds are automatic, so stuff like this happens. By the way NoNameNoBlame, even when you do partitioning manually without graphical tools you can easily mess up. Stuff like partition boundary calculations are much better done automatically, especially in more complicated cases like LUKS where you need to take into the account that LUKS header takes some space. And don't use developer edition for enterprise development! This bug does not happen in stable edition. In fact I can't imagine any reason for crash to happen during the operation except for underlying command line tool crash. I'm not saying data eating bugs are impossible in graphical partition manager. They are possible but very rare. If it happens that data is lost due to a reproducible bug in graphical user interface then the fix would be released very quickly. |
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Dear stikonas!
Exactly 3 days after Your nice posting, my graphical KDE partitioner crashed on KDE neon User Edition. While trying to partition a USB stick. The USB stick seems bricked, somehow. It doesn't hold any partition tables any more. It can be partitioned from the command line without errors. But after exiting the 'gdisk' program, there's not data written on the stick, even if 'gdisk' before told me, it had done so successfully. But: Command line 'gdisk' didn't crash. Graphical 'KDE Partition Manager' crashed. |
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KDE Developer
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Well, if hardware is bricked I wouldn't be too surprised that Partition Manager crashes. It probably tries to do more than simple fdisk/gdisk. E.g. if it can't read sector size (maybe that's not the case if you usb stick) it would probably have it set to 0 and then crash somewhere upon division... But in case of bricked software it's not like fdisk will magically save it...
Well, if you post backtrace I can look at it... |
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KDE Developer
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Hmm, looks like crash happens somewhere in parted, so not really GUIs fault. I gave them this link but I suspect parted would just say that it's hardware fault... I think I had some similar situation before.
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Thanks a lot for Your most friendly attention!
Even if there is a hardware defect at the bottom: It looks like incomplete error-handling to me. That's the developers' responsibility. It can't be shifted onto faulty hardware. Besides: How should a normal user know this true cause? In addition: It's their program that crashes. They will get the complaints. I think, they will be motivated to become active in fixing this. Thanks, again! |
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KDE Developer
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Yeah, I understand. But unfortunately when crash happens in the library (in this case libparted) there is nothing that GUI can do. It cannot stop the crash from happening and show error message. I don't know why library does something this ugly. Well but stuff like that happens... Sometimes there are nasty crash bugs inside Qt or GTK libraries too.
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