Note to Partition Wizard users: serious bug found: overlapping partitions created

I have found a serious bug in Partition Wizard Home Edition v4.2.2, boot cd edition. When moving a logical partition to the farthest possible extent towards one of its adjacent logical partitions, overlapping partitions may be created. If the bug happens, within Partition Wizard you will notice that the moved partition appears to disappear. Third-party program GParted reports that overlapping partitions exist. The overlap can also be seen in third-party program TestDisk. I have seen this bug happen two separate times, each time I tried it.

I did not test whether the bug also happens with primary partitions, nor with the hard disk-based Partition Wizard, nor with prior versions of Partition Wizard.

I have sent a bug report to the company.

 

Thanks, I hope they will fix it.

 

You're welcome.

Detailed steps to reproduce:

Create 3 logical partitions that are aligned as follows:
L1, L2, Unallocated space, L3

where L1, L2 and L3 are logical partitions with unallocated space between L2 and L3. L1 and L2 are adjacent with no unallocated space between them. Now do a move operation on L2, moving it as close to L3 as possible. After the operation is done, if the bug occurs, L2 and L3 will overlap.

 

MrBrian: Did you receive and feedback from the company about this bug?

 

Hi MrBrian and thanks for this info,

well, this is weird - and possibly coincidental I might add - because yesterday I performed a similar operation but I used my GParted disk to do it, and not my PW disk. You can see in the ss I have within the extended part in order: swap (sda6), / (sda5) & /home (sda7). Before that, however, they went as: /, swap & /home. I wanted to re-arrange the / & swap parts so swap would be the first, so I used GParted disk to first delete the swap, then I slid the / furthest to the right, then re-created the swap in the leftover space to the left.

You will see in the ss of the terminal command where I ran: ~ $ sudo cfdisk take a look at the error Does this mean the same problem is happening with GParted (v0.5.1)?? Good thing is I'm not having any issues with the Linux Mint install, nor does GParted report an overlap, but of course the cfdisk command seems to indicate the swap (sda6) is enlarged and overlapping.

 

Yes, I did receive a reply today. I was asked for further details to reproduce, and I sent in response the steps detailed in my last post.

 

You're welcome; I am not sure but it seems to warrant further inspection. If you have TestDisk or some other program that reports the actual partition boundaries, you can manually check if partitions are truly overlapping one another. TestDisk is also found on Ultimate Boot CD (for DOS).

 

Okay, i will try TestDisk a little later. Thanks!

*Edit*

okay, I ran Testdisk (looks to be a powerful little utility ) and there doesn't appear to be any problems, especially with regards to start - end sectors; they look to be in order, though I could be interpreting things incorrectly.

 

I got another response from the company today. The bug has been forwarded to the development team, and I've been told that I'll receive further email when they identify the problem.

 

I'm not seeing any overlap either in your posted numbers . On my system, I did see an overlap using TestDisk.

Word of warning about TestDisk: after the overlap problem, I let TestDisk rebuild the partition table. Afterwards there was no more partition overlap problem, but several previously working partitions were then reported as corrupt and inaccessible by Windows 7 ! I'm glad this computer is only a test system for now....

 

I make it a point not to fool with Mother Nature or disk geometry. If I have a questionable partition, I copy its data on another partition in a folder called "Work", then using a partition manager I delete the questionable partition and recreate it. Then I copy the contents of the "Work" folder back on the newly created partition. Usually, that takes care of the problem. A partition image might be able to do the same but I am not sure if the image would carry over the problem I had in the first place so I haven't tried it. Good luck.

SourMilk out

 

As I was just about to download and use PW when I saw MrBrian's post, I decided to query the folks at MT Solution Ltd. and pose the question about any further developments since MrBrian surfaced this issue.

MT sent me the following response on 12 March 2010:

"This issue only exists in the Windows Edition. Our technicians fixed it but we did not release the new version yet. We had about 3 feedback from customer who had this problem. (We have over half million customers in 1 year since we released Partition Wizard) You can use Partition Wizard Boot CD instead of Windows if you cautious."

Just an FYI.

Bob

 

Thank you Harrynhoot for your followup . I did not receive any further emails from the company other than what I stated already.

I'm pretty sure that I did find the problem in the boot CD version, not the Windows version. I never even installed the Windows version, to the best of my recollection. In fact, I even specified in my first post that I was using the boot cd version.

 

Looks like they now have version 5. Do not know if this fixes bug.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html

 

Thank you for the notice about the new version tgell .

I've tested Partition Wizard Home Edition v5.0, boot cd edition only. This bug appears to have been fixed according to my testing, at least in the boot cd edition.