Comment 3 for bug 387692

Uaname, I'd suggest opening another bug report since the problem with not being able to see partitions with the karmic sounds like it may be a much more fundamental problem --- I suspect some kind of kernel issue where the Karmic kernel isn't compatible with your "older drives". You should specify in that new bug report what kind of drives they are --- SATA? IDE? (I suspect IDE) and what controller they are using. An output of the dmesg on boot of the Karmic kernel and the Jaunty kernel would also be useful. I'm guessing that your older drives are using IDE, and there is some kind of problem with the IDE driver that simply wasn't caught during testing, since it's been a number of years since computers have been sold with IDE, and so it's less likely that Ubuntu testers would have caught that problem.

As far as ext4 is concerned, it's out of beta as far as I'm concerned, and for desktop use it should be quite stable. There are some specific ext4 features which are in beta, but they aren't enabled by default. (More on one of them in a bit.) The "failed to set superblock flags" is an error that is normally caused by a corrupted journal file. My apologies for not looking at this sooner but the original bug report got lost in my inbox. If you still have the corrupted disk, I can probably help you recover it, but I'm guessing you've since reformatted the disk. If it's any comfort (and I doubt it will be), the exact same thing could have just as easily happened with ext3. The journal checksum feature is still in beta (and so it's not enabled by default), and that might have been able to detect the corrupted journal transaction and skip it, minimizing the damage.

Best regards,

-- Ted