Installer lacks support for using whole disks

[schnittchen]

The installer allows filesystems to be put onto an entire disk, bare any disklabel.

However, when doing so, the filesystem formatting (ext3 in my case) hangs (a).
Moreover (b), when using such a whole disk for the root filesystem and choosing "Rescue a broken system" in the bootloader on the installer CD, the device will not appear in the menu "Enter rescue mode: Device to use as root filesystem".

A workaround for (a) is to enter a parallel console during formatting, identifying the hanging mkfs.ext3 process using ps, killing it and issueing the mkfs command by hand (*). The installer will say that the partitioning process failed and drop back to the partitioning options. Select to NOT format the device and continue.

Since at the point (*) I was asked for confirmation (because I used the entire disk), I suspect this is the reason for the formatting to hang after all.

A workaround for (b), in case you know what to fix right away after installing, is to NOT reboot at the end of the installation, but instead to go into a busybox shell and chroot into /target.

I am preparing intrepid to be used some time in the future on my production system. In order to avoid the notoriously buggy upgrade path, I prepared an lvm logical volume for the root filesystem and made it accessible to a virtualbox virtual system. Thus, I needed to install the root system on a "whole disk".
I suspect there are less complicated situations where this bug is triggered.