starting partitioner freezes machine at 50%

[Jeff Breidenbach]

Description:

Trying to install a Ubuntu from the LiveCD, I get through the first few stages and then a dialog appears that days "starting paritioner". It has a progress bar that zooms to 50% instantly. After about two seconds, the animated progress bar stops its animation and the computer has completely frozen. No mouse, no response to ctrl-alt-delete. Only recovery is powercycle. I suspect this is related to the x25-e solid state drive.

Reproducibility:

100%. Reproduces exactly on Ibex AMD64, Ibex i386, Hardy AMD64

Expected behaviour:

Getting past the starting paritioner dialog.

Actual behaviour:

Complete lockup.

Keywords:

paritioner, freeze, ssd, x25-e, solid state drive, installer, ubiquity, ssd, installation failure, crash

Additonal information:

The hard disk is an Intel X25-E, which is their new superfast solid state disk. The hardware is known good and I've successfully installed and run Ubuntu in the past using other drives - and have never experienced any flakiness. I am able to manually parition the drive using fdisk, creating a swap and linux parition. I was able to manually format the linux parition to ext3 and set zero out swap using dd. None of this helps. The Ibex text based installer got further, paritioning fine but froze up at the "scanning CD for apt" dialog at 12% (probably a separate issue)

I have attached readouts from lspci, hdparm, and fdisk.

[Jeff Breidenbach (jeff-jab)]

This machine is directly attached to the internet; assuming the LiceCD supports it I'm happy to enable a remote login if anyone wants to poke around. Or think of this as great excuse to buy an Intel x25-e. (No idea if the x25-m will have the same problem or not) Web search finds one similar incident report.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=220086

[Jeff Breidenbach (jeff-jab)]

Finally found an installation path that works. Never burnt so many CDs in my life.

8.10 i386 live cd : FREEZE
8.10 amd64 lice cd : FREEZE
8.04 amd64 live cd : FREEZE
8.10 amd64 alternate cd : hangs, but way after paritioning
8.04.1 amd64 alternate cd : SUCCESS

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Closing since it seems it was fixed in 8.04.1.