PC freezes during install caused by Dell A920 printer

[Piscium]

I downloaded the alpha 4 CD image, checked MD5, burned a CD, and run it.

I did not go far. After choosing language, location, keyboard, it says it is starting the partition manager, and that is it. Nothing happens after, so I had to press the power button to switch the PC off.

Nothing much special with my PC. It is a 4.5 year old Dell Dimension. It has two hard disks, the master with two partitions, Dell Utility, and Windows XP. The second disk however, has 12 partitions with a number of empty spaces in between. Some partitions have Ubuntu or Kubuntu (ext4), others are empty, one is for Windows swapping. Also the partition numbers are not in order, for example, after sdb10 comes sdb5. My guess is that the partition editor got confused and lost!

Today I installed jaunty for a different test and all went well. So this is a karmic bug.

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Today (17/Aug) I tried again to install alpha 4, and got exactly the same error, so this is a repeatable issue (on my PC).

I paid a bit more attention to what happened. After step 4 of the installation where I chose the keyboard, a dialogue box appeared, titled "Starting up the partitioner". Below it said - I believe - scanning disks, and a few other things, very quickly. There was a progress bar which went fast from 0 to 100%. Then the dialogue box disappeared and the PC froze. The cursor would still move, but clicking on the Quit button had no effect. Also tried ^C, ^D, Escape, nothing worked. So I had to power off the PC.

It appears that there is a bug on that part of the installer where a list of options with respect to partitions is created. The screen was never updated to show step 5.

I offer to try again to install alpha 4 if someone takes an interest in this bug. I would need instructions on how to enable diagnostics and on how to unfreeze the PC without powering it off, in order to save the diagnostics somewhere, for example, on the USB drive.

I am attaching below the list of partitions on my PC.

António

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Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd0f4738c

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 7 56196 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 * 8 9726 78067867+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c9a37

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 522 4192933+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 * 523 2089 12586927+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 2612 7833 41945715 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 13054 60801 383535810 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 26762 27283 4192933+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb6 27284 30677 27262273+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 54274 60801 52436128+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb8 30678 32635 15727603+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb9 33289 35246 15727603+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb10 24151 26761 20972826 83 Linux
/dev/sdb11 13055 18276 41945683+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb12 18277 20887 20972826 83 Linux
/dev/sdb13 20888 23498 20972826 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdc: 4009 MB, 4009754624 bytes
51 heads, 51 sectors/track, 3010 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2601 * 512 = 1331712 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x04030201

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 3011 3915204 b W95 FAT32

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Update 25/Aug/2009.

Did some more tests and narrowed down the bug.

I have a Dell All-in-One printer, model A920. If I disconnect the USB cable of the printer, the PC does not freeze between steps 4 and 5. Note that normally the printer is off, so even though off it causes problems.

This is just speculation. What may happen is that the partition editor tries to find pen drives or USB external hard disks, then it gets confused when it gets a printer and thinks it is a disk, or it may perhaps try to find its partitions, who knows.

Dell All-in-One printers are rebranded Lexmark printers. This bug might also manifest with other Dell or Lexmark printers (again I am speculating).

The fact though is that I installed Ubuntu 9.04 four times, and Kubuntu 9.04 twice, and it went smoothly, so this is a Karmic (alpha 4) issue.

António

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

My guess is that the all-in-one printer provides an USB mass-storage device interface for storing scans (I know some do, don't know about yours) and something is going wrong there...

Maybe you can attach the last lines of dmesg after you plug the printer into an USB port? (If you don't know what I mean by "last", just attach all of dmesg output.)

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

I'm not sure this bug also affects GParted (I added ubiquity, the Ubuntu GUI installer).

[Piscium (piscium)]

Jan, Thanks for taking an interest.

OK, I am on Ubuntu 9.04 (which does not have this Gparted/printer problem) with the printer disconnected, so plugged it in. There were some messages about looking for driver and so on, I cancelled them. Then ran dmesg and got this:

[ 2862.488044] usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 2862.660648] usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 2862.663278] hub 3-2:1.0: USB hub found
[ 2862.666342] hub 3-2:1.0: 2 ports detected
[ 2862.945281] usb 3-2.1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 2863.083441] usb 3-2.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 2863.173369] usb 3-2.2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
[ 2863.310528] usb 3-2.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 2863.339519] usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 4 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x413C pid 0x5106
[ 2863.339546] usbcore: registered new interface driver usblp
[ 2864.988685] ppdev0: registered pardevice
[ 2865.036260] ppdev0: unregistered pardevice

Then I unplugged the USB cable and rebooted with the Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 4, chose option "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer", then plugged in the printer USB cable. Again there were some messages about looking for driver and so on, I cancelled them. Then ran dmesg and got this:

[ 359.572016] usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 359.745096] usb 3-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 359.748090] hub 3-2:1.0: USB hub found
[ 359.750060] hub 3-2:1.0: 2 ports detected
[ 360.029939] usb 3-2.1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 360.168052] usb 3-2.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 360.249908] usb 3-2.2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
[ 360.387010] usb 3-2.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 360.606947] usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 4 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x413C pid 0x5106
[ 360.606974] usbcore: registered new interface driver usblp

Then I went on the System menu I ran Gparted. After a while there was a dialogue box saying that "Sorry, the program "system-config-printer.py" closed unexpectedly. It was the second time this happened to me, but it does not happen every time - i. e. it is not consistently reproducible. One could ask why is Gparted looking for a printer. That error message offered me the possibility to send a report. I said yes. Here it is the new bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/422180

Then I rebooted again to reproduce the issue once more. This time around however Gparted froze the PC, and I had to power it off. The cursor would still move but that was it. At the bottom left of the Gparted window there was a message "Scanning all devices", and the progress about was about a third done. It's strange how Gparted seems to be able to freeze the window manager.

The moral of the story is that Gparted has frozen my PC as part of running the Karmic install script, and has also frozen my PC if I call if from the Karmic live CD.

As I said previously, Gparted in Ubuntu 9.04 works fine on my PC.

António

[Piscium (piscium)]

Just wanted to add that this bug is not important in the big scheme of things, as it probably affects a very small number of people.

It is however an unpleasant bug for this reason: when the PC freezes, one has no idea why it froze. It took a bit of detective work (and luck) to find out the reason.

[Jaap Woldringh (jjh-woldringh)]

I have a problem with Kubuntu Karmic Alpha-5 which is similar to this one, might be related to it, but probably is not exactly the same:

I cannot install this on my test computer because it doesn't find the partition tables of the existing installation (on both of the two hard disks).

Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) however runs fine on this computer, Gparted shows both hard disks as it should, and after starting the Jaunty LiveCD the partition tables on both disks are shown with fdisk -l /dev/sda and same for sdb.

So ...

Hope this helps. As it is Karmic on my test computer can't be installed.
This is a very important bug as far as I can see :)

Jaap Woldringh

[Jaap Woldringh (jjh-woldringh)]

Just adding that I tried this on two other computers, on which the partition tables were detected fine. Both have only one hard disk, the other computer, as I said, has two.

Jaap Woldringh

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Is this still happening with currently supported releases?

[Piscium (piscium)]

This is such an old bug, I suggest that it be closed. Also I don't use that printer anymore, as it is really low quality.