On 12/07/2026 at 11:07, Holger Wansing wrote:
Am 12. Juli 2026 08:25:51 MESZ schrieb Pascal Hambourg 
<[email protected]>:.
I had opened a merge request against partman-base [1] to skip a drive if 
mounted on /cdrom or /hd-media, but put it on hold after considering that it 
might break some (admittedly edge) use cases. Maybe that check should apply 
only to automatic partitioning ?

Sounds like a good compromise to me...
And most probably the best we can do here.

After giving some more thought, I think we can do better without breaking any sensible use case.

There are 3 possible situations regarding the source installation media:
- the entire disk is mounted
- a partition is mounted and seen by parted
- a partition is mounted and unseen by parted (because it considers the partition table in installation/live ISOhybrid images invalid for various legitimate reasons)

For all partitioning modes:
- if the entire disk is mounted -> skip the disk
- if a partition is mounted and unseen by parted -> skip the disk
"Skip" means that the disk will not be visible nor usable for partitioning.

For manual partitioning:
- lock the mounted partition
"Lock" means that the partition is visible but altering or deleting it or creating a new partition table on its disk is prohibited. This is an existing feature designed to protect RAID members and physical volumes for LVM and encryption, but AFAICS the lock is checked only in manual partitioning.

For automatic partitioning using an entire disk:
- skip the disk with a mounted partition
"Skip" means that the disk is not added to the available disk list.

For automatic partitioning using the largest free space:
- nothing more to do, an unusable disk would already be skipped by the general checks for all partitioning modes.

Opinions ?

If you have time to adapt the MR like this, and we get a mini.iso out of this, 
Kevin could test it directly, since he has all the bits ready for such test :-)

I cannot make any promises for the near future. Persistent heat drains all my energy...

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