Installer silently crashed at the end. Not obvious - installed system works.

[Nathan Dorfman]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

At the end of the installation, I am taken to the live desktop. This strikes me as weird later, but now I simply reboot into a fully working new grub and karmic partition. Much later, I notice that ubiquity, casper, gparted and other packages that should have been removed at the end are on the system. Then, I discover that /var/log/installer doesn't exist.

I've just reproduced this for the third time. I'm no longer certain there's a bug, because of two things I missed the first two times. Nonetheless, I decided it was worth entering, as I didn't realize there was a crash, even the second time! Only when I asked why the installer would exit to the live desktop instead of rebooting did it become clear what happened here.

The new developments are:

- Physical errors on a hard drive. These could have been there the entire time, and somehow caused the crash (the drive has been unused for a while and the graphical installer doesn't mention the errors -- I only noticed because I looked at the console this time). Is it worth doing it again after I replace that drive?

- The crash notification. The first two times, I probably rebooted manually before it appeared. This time, I already had a terminal and ubuntu-bug ubiquity open before it appeared. The floating notification only says that some app has crashed (clicking it tells me that it was ubiquity). Is this the only intended notification that the installer crashed?

This is the karmic alpha 2 amd64 desktop live installer, with "Install Ubuntu" rather than "Try Ubuntu" chosen at start all three times. I've tried reproducing this in VirtualBox on the same system and failed (the installer finished as it should).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jul 4 05:10:36 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Alpha amd64 (20090610.1)
Package: ubiquity 1.13.3 [modified: lib/partman/automatically_partition/question]
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.30-8.9-generic
SourcePackage: ubiquity
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-8-generic x86_64

[Nathan Dorfman (ndorf)]

I've just reproduced yet again, with the broken drive removed. There are two good drives, and I've used 'Use entire disk' on sda.

It looks like this is a "duplicate" of #260001 (ubiquity crashed with InstallStepError in configure_bootloader() ).

However, unlike that bug, I'm using the 'Use entire disk' option.

[Nathan Dorfman (ndorf)]

ubuntu@ubuntu:/var/log/installer$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00047255

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 88241 708795801 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 88242 91201 23776200 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 88242 91201 23776168+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0003af3d

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 120858 970791853+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 120859 121601 5968147+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 120859 121601 5968116 82 Linux swap / Solaris

[Nathan Dorfman (ndorf)]

I should also note that the crash notification appeared at least a minute into the live desktop session ...