Comment 11 for bug 1215458

OK. This crash is from the ext2/3/4 filesystem creation code in parted, and, having looked at it, it's woefully unprepared for sector sizes larger than 1024 bytes (for that matter, I don't know whether it works for 1024-byte sectors, but there are definitely problems above that). This code is deprecated upstream and was removed in parted 3. However, we've been unable to upgrade Debian/Ubuntu to this so far because it would break the installer (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696123).

In my opinion, it is not safe to attempt a fix to this code in parted; it would require fairly extensive modifications and without upstream support there's no guarantee I'd get it right. However, a much easier change is to use mkfs.ext2 here instead. We already do that for ext3/4; ext2 is only involved here because of some weirdness in the LVM setup code in d-i. We lose progress bar support, but since we're already lacking that for the much more common ext3/4 filesystems, I don't think that's a big deal.