Installation freezes during virtual disk formatting

[Agostino Russo]

It has been reported that sometimes the installer freezes during virtual disk formatting (typically at 33% during System.Virtual.Disk formatting). A pause of 1-15 minutes may be normal, but longer than that is pathological. There are known issues that can cause similar symptoms: a missing HD/controller module will slow down disk I/O to the point that users might think it is jammed. Also, if the virtual disk image file is not properly pre-allocated with the host filesystem (ntfs) that might cause slowdowns. But the problem has been reported also by users with full DMA acceleration that waited several hours.

None of the devs has been able to reproduce the error so far, and even among users that experienced that, it seems that the issue occurs randmoly (repeating the installation sometimes succeeds). NTFS decompression/defragmentation help only occasionally. Reducing the virtual disk size to <= 4GB sometimes seems to help too. As of today we have no clear (and reproducible) understanding of the causes/solutions. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide under "known issues".

[Richard M. (richardm1369)]

17 retries and I gave up with this silly program, wubi, and refuse to try it again for anyone. I'll wait until I buy my MacBook Pro next month for an open source configuration.

[sevag krikorian (sevag-krikorian)]

I did some experimentation and here are the results:

Using standard settings (10 gig + 10 gig) install crashes during
virtual disk format at 33%
Using settings (5 gig + 5 gig) install stalls during virtual disk
format at 33% then crashes at 83%
Using settings (4 gig + 4 gig) install stalls at 33% then continues
and finishes installation.

With all settings, I get multiple warnings: MBR cylinders doesn't
match BIOS, MBR sectors doesn't match BIOS.

After reboot, system begins to load ubuntu, I can see logo. Then it
exits to shell. It can't find apt-get. Checking PATH, I notice that
/usr/bin is not on it. I load /etc/bash.bashrc into vi and add
/usr/bin to the path. When I exit shell, it continues to load and
gives me user box. I enter the user name and password given during
wubi install, system can't find it.

So I reboot. System loads and exits to shell giving me error:
Filesystem check failed. Exiting shell continues to load to user
selection box. Again, system can't find the user name/passward I
entered during wubi install.

I hope this helps, there is nothing further I can do.

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

should have been fixed in test3

[Darkmaster (darkmaster)]

I had this problem but it was solved using the latest minefield.

[sevag krikorian (sevag-krikorian)]

I downloaded test3. Good work people. No problems at all even with
10 + 10 + 1 gigs virtual drive.

I'm writing this from ubuntu!
Thanks all for your hard work.

On 6/7/07, Agostino Russo <email address hidden> wrote:
> should have been fixed in test3
>
> ** Changed in: lupin (upstream)
> Status: Unconfirmed => Fix Committed
>
> --
> Installation freezes during virtual disk formatting
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/115217
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

Released as of Wubi-7.04.01+