subiquity

subiquity installer does not allow to delete existing partition

Bug #1868249 reported by Frank Heimes
22
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ubuntu on IBM z Systems
Confirmed
Medium
Canonical Foundations Team
subiquity
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

While doing a subiquity installation on s390x using DASD disk storage that was used before and was therefore already partitioned, I wanted to change the partition layout during install time.
But in the 'Storage configuration' task I was not able to delete an existing partition:

   ┌───────────────── Cannot delete partition of local disk ────────────────┐
   │ │
   │ Cannot delete a single partition from a device that already has │
   │ partitions. │
   │ │
   │ [ Close ] │
   │ │
   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

It should always be possible to delete an existing partition or to white out (low-level format in case of a DASD) the entire disk.
Otherwise existing and already used disks cannot be used with a different partition scheme anymore (without manual intervention).

subiquity 20.03.1 was in use.

Btw. I updated to 20.03.2, but subiquity didn't automatically restarted, and since I forgot to restart it manually I stayed on 20.03.1.

Not sure if this issue is the same for all disks, or limited to s390x DASD disks.

See original description
Frank Heimes (fheimes)
Changed in ubuntu-z-systems:
importance: Undecided → High
assignee: nobody → Canonical Foundations Team (canonical-foundations)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson) wrote :

It's true that deleting an existing partition does not work. You should be able to reformat the whole disk, though?

Changed in subiquity:
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Frank Heimes (fheimes) wrote :

Yes, that's correct.
Selecting the Format (Re-format) option on the entire disk itself will clean up the entire disk with all it's options and one can procced:

================================================================================
  Storage configuration [ Help ]
================================================================================
  To continue you need to: Mount a filesystem at /

  FILE SYSTEM SUMMARY ^
                                                                             │
    MOUNT POINT SIZE TYPE DEVICE TYPE │
  [ /boot 896.000M new ext4 new partition of local disk > ] │
                                                                             │
                                                                             │
  AVAILABLE DEVICES │
                                                                             │
    DEVICE TY┌─────────────────────────┐
  [ LX0200 lo│< (close) │
    free space │ Info >│
                                                     │ Reformat >│
  [ Create software RAID (md) > ] │ Add VTOC Partition >│
  [ Create volume group (LVM) > ] │ Format >│
                                                     │ Remove from RAID/LVM │
                                 [ Done ] └─────────────────────────┘
                                 [ Reset ]
                                 [ Back ]

The option to selectively delete a partition is just there (ready to use and not grayed out), hence I tried it. So of course nothing super critical ...

Changed in ubuntu-z-systems:
importance: High → Medium
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Frank Heimes (fheimes) wrote :

Yes, selecting the whole disk and formatting it entirely works.
(Just not selectively deleting a partition, like the menu let's one think ...)

Revision history for this message
Frank Heimes (fheimes) wrote :

I get from time to time feedback that the deletion of partitions is broken in subiquity and that people don't know what to do - they tend to go to the installer shell and do things manually ...

And I have to explain more often the workaround to Reformat and add VTOC-Partitions instead.
Would probably be worth to think about adding support to delete partitions selectively ...

Changed in subiquity:
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
Changed in ubuntu-z-systems:
status: Triaged → Confirmed
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