installation fails leaving PC unbootable

[Ian Mackenzie]

Tested on ubuntu 9.04 beta & kubuntu 9.04 beta (both i386)

When manually partitioning to keep existing /home, ubiquity exits with no crash message (or "report this problem" message) and without the traditional "Restart now to start using ubuntu" message.

On rebooting, grub menu does not appear - messages from text mode:
GRUB Loading stage 1.5

GRUB Loading, please wait...
Error 17

and on booting again from the LiveCD, the root partition has /boot, but not /boot/grub

/dev/sda1 is ntfs (with bad sectors, so left there)
/dev/sda2 is /
/dev/sda3 is swap
/dev/sda4 is /home

Trying again - wipe all but the ntfs partition, create one big ext3 partition: (this is where the log comes from) - same result on reboot.

[Ian Mackenzie (gldcompsol)]

Tried again, used different hard disk, instructed ubiquity to use the entire disk.

X restarted towards the end of the installation - I might have been looking elsewhere and had ubiquity do this in the previous installs.

This time GRUB gives error 2 on rebooting.

again, there is no /boot/grub on the newly installed disk.

Hardware:
Sempron2600+ (socket 754) on MSI 7142 motherboard with NVIDIA FX5200 AGP video card, 1GB RAM

[Ian Mackenzie (gldcompsol)]

The problem appears to happen at the 90% Hardware detection stage.

With the video card removed and using the onboard VIA video, X froze & the cursor would not respond.

With a different video card (AGP SIS XABRE), X restarted a few seconds after hardware detection started. Rebooting gave GRUB error 15.

The 3rd set of attachments come from the SIS attempt

[Ian Mackenzie (gldcompsol)]

Update:

I just tried installing the AMD64 version of Kubuntu (which had installed fine on a Socket AM2 PC just beforehand) and it also froze at the 90% Detecting Hardware part of installation.

Is there a problem with ubiquity & Socket 754 motherbaords (with VIA chipset)?

[Ian Mackenzie (gldcompsol)]

Another update:

Ubuntu 9.04 Beta CD - chose "Install Ubuntu" option rather than "Start/Install Ubuntu" - The installer reahed Hardware Detection, then X restarted.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've committed what I think is likely to be a fix for this, for the upcoming ubiquity 1.12.0. Since I can't reproduce this myself, I'd appreciate it if you could try a daily build in a few days' time and tell us whether it still breaks; if it does, please reopen this bug.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubiquity - 1.12.0

---------------
ubiquity (1.12.0) jaunty; urgency=low

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Update for new message context system in GTK+ 2.15.1, and update
    imported translations from gtk+2.0 2.16.0-1ubuntu2.
  * Stop setting message attribute in InstallStepError; it isn't used and it
    generates a deprecation warning with Python 2.6. Similarly, rename
    PartedServerError's message attribute to parted_error.
  * Always set auto-login for OEM installations.
  * KDE frontend:
    - Hide auto-login and require-password radio buttons for OEM
      installations.
  * Remove reimplementation of gdm and kdm auto-login support for OEM
    installations, since user-setup handles this now and the duplication
    causes oem-config to be unable to undo autologin (LP: #347900).
  * Fix ubiquity/install_bootloader handling (LP: #348660):
    - Check the seen flag rather its value when deciding whether to override
      it with the UI's value.
    - Outside automatic mode, default the UI's "Install boot loader"
      question to the value of ubiquity/install_bootloader.
  * Offer "Yes" and "No" choices for user-setup/password-weak (LP: #349173).
  * Depend on grub | grub-pc, and don't remove grub-pc until after
    grub-installer has had the chance to decide whether it wants to use it
    (LP: #349835).
  * Add a compatibility wrapper for update-dev to ensure that it never
    attempts to call 'udevadm trigger', which isn't necessary in ubiquity
    and can cause problems (LP: #349937).
  * Permit dmraid-style /dev/mapper/* device names in advanced boot loader
    selector, as well as disk and partition numbers over 9 (LP: #342354).
  * Remove /target/var/lib/apt-xapian-index per Michael Vogt, since it needs
    to be rebuilt based on the installed system's sources.list, and apt's
    cron.daily script and/or synaptic will do this.
  * Preserve ordering of automatic partitioning choices when replacing them
    with our customised strings (LP: #351547).
  * Update translations from Launchpad.
  * Automatic update of included source packages: apt-setup 1:0.37ubuntu11,
    base-installer 1.98ubuntu4, console-setup 1.28ubuntu7, grub-installer
    1.36ubuntu5, hw-detect 1.71ubuntu6, partman-base 129ubuntu4,
    partman-target 58ubuntu6.

  [ Evan Dandrea ]
  * Make the partman/unmount_active dialog a yes or no question
    (LP: #346589).
  * Sort the list of regions on the timezone page (LP: #344334).
  * Merge Roman's city placement code into the GTK frontend.
  * Work in bytes rather than percentages in the partition bar code
    (LP: #336203).
  * Fix partition bar slider (for resizing) code by adding correct
    calculations for bounds checking and slider positioning.
  * Properly encode data from os-prober (LP: #345573).
  * Make sure that the before and after partitioning bars use the same
    colors for the same partitions (LP: #289324).
  * Fix the placement of the partition bars in scrolled windows when
    necessary.
  * Don't let the partition bars eat up any extra space.
  * Move selecting a disk from radio buttons to a drop down box on the
    automatic partitioning page. This saves a lot of space when...

[noisymime (josh-noisymime)]

Fix appears to work for me. Ubiquity 1.11.20 from the 9.04 beta would crash on "Detecting Hardware" causing the X server to restart.

Booted beta live CD, performed apt-get upgrade on ubiquity to version 1.12.5 and everything worked OK.

Thanks for the update!

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Great, thanks for following up.