Subject: Bug in GNU Parted - mistakes MBR for a FAT32 partition

From: Sebastian Audet <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2016 17:08:13 -0500

I have a FAT32 partition on an MSDOS style disk (its actually an mSata
drive connected through USB for ultimate installation in another hardware
device that must read FAT32 - long story and tertiary to what I've found),
and through much debugging of software, I believe I have found a rather bad
bug in the Parted software.

Using the latest parted 3.2, when opening a device and creating a disk from
said device, the msdos partition table detector will fail if the fat32
partition detector fails to fail. I'm not sure why, but parted thinks my
boot sector (my MBR, the first sector on the disk) looks like a fat32
partition.

I'm fairly sure this is in fact an MSDOS disk, not a fat32 disk, as both my
operating system, and the native operating system intended to read it
believe it is in fact not one giant fat32 disk, but a free space partition,
and a fat32 partition. I was able to resize my partition by commenting out
the fat32 probe checks in the partition table detector. Is there any way we
can get a flag to be able to turn off this extra detection if we're fairly
sure parted is getting things wrong?

Regards,
Sebastian