Live install step "Prepare partitions" hangs on 9.10-beta 64bits

[Barry Staes]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Installation fails on my system when first booting via the Live CD and choosing install. The "Install" window captioned "Prepare partitions" shows an empty device list, with all buttons greyed out (all partition related plus Forward and Back, but Quit works) while the mousepointer does her clock animation.

Reproducable on hardware;
- Core i7, Shuttle SX58H7 motherboard, SSD (Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB) via SATA2

Notes;
- Reproducible on this system.
- Previously various 32 bits Jaunty releases installed successful. (same hardware)
- I have not (yet) tried the text-mode installer.
- I saw no HDD/SSD's partitions mounted.
- I have Windows 7 Pro installed on 50% of the SSD, rest is unused/unpartitioned.

As requested some attachments;
/var/log/syslog is attached, for
/var/log/partman see below.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Oct 10 23:55:41 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.6
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Beta amd64 (20090929.2)
Package: ubiquity 1.99.28
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.36-generic
SourcePackage: ubiquity
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic x86_64

[Barry Staes (barrystaes)]

The other requested file. (sorry i could only attach one file per comment)

[Barry Staes (barrystaes)]

Circumvented this bug by not going to the live environment; the normal (graphical) installation in the LiveCD boot menu worked flawless.

PS; the timezone/county selection box in either installation environment doesn't respond to typing a few letters to quickly select the aptly named item. Not sure where to report this tidbit of info, so i'll just mention it here.

[Evan (ev)]

Can you please run the installer again in debug mode (`ubiquity -d` from a terminal window) until it crashes, then attach /var/log/syslog, /var/log/partman, /var/log/installer/debug, and the output of `sudo parted /dev/sda print all`?

Thanks!

[lucko (luckoj)]

I have that problem too and it disapeared when I use other sata disk (which is smaller-120GB)

[Michael Schmidt (michaelmschmidt)]

Same problem here, using the Ubuntu 9.10, amd64 final release disk. I downloaded the .iso, burned it, and used the "check disk for errors" option before installing. Disk was fine. I then selected "Install Ubuntu" from the first menu and it hung on the "Prepare Partitions" exactly as described in the initial bug report. I then rebooted and selected the "Try Ubuntu" option. Once the LiveCD system booted up, I opened a terminal and ran "ubiquity -d" and collected the info requested by Evan Dandrea. I copied the logs into a directory on a USB drive, tar'ed them, and attached them here.

I though that perhaps the problem with detecting the partition might be the wrong version of Grub on my hard disk. So, I installed Grub2 on my hard drive with my Ubuntu 9.04. Works fine, but it made no difference to the 9.10 install.

[owen (williams-owen)]

I had the same symptoms on my Asus m2a-vm hdmi (AMD 690G) board. I tried the i386 and AMD64 iso and neither worked from install from boot or install from live ubuntu. I wouldn't say that the prepare partitions screen hung, rather that the list of partitions/devices was empty.

In my particular case, the problem is to do with RAID. My board supports RAID, but I have it set to use IDE controller in the bios. I think the installer on live CD seems to see my (disabled) raid support and lists only raid partitions (I have none).

For me the solution was to download the alternative text based installer which provides an additional install screen asking whether to look for raid partitions. If I choose 'yes', I get no devices/partitions. If I choose 'no', I see my partitions and the install can be successfully completed.

The odd thing is that the live ubuntu can see the partitions, but the live installer cannot.

[Michael Schmidt (michaelmschmidt)]

Owen, using the text-based alternate installation disk worked fine. Thanks for the info. Still, there appears to be a glitch (dare I say "bug") in the way the 9.10 LiveCD installer populates the "prepare partitions" window. I had no problem with the 9.04 LiveCD installation - on the exact same hardware.

[exactt (giesbert)]

exactly same problem here. attaching requested files.

[Janne Siren (merjanne-siren)]

I had the same symptom: empty list in "Prepare partitions" page.
The reason in my case was that the disk was used, several years ago in a server with RAID configuration. Disks were updated to the server and old once were reused in old laptops. Everything worked fine until I needed to reinstall the laptop with Ubuntu 9.10. I do not know for sure, but I'll assume that the Ubuntu installer does not show "raw" disks which belongs to RAID configuration, but instead tries to show the RAID device. As in my case the "raw" disk was detected to be part of RAID, but there was no RAID configuration in the laptop the installer ended up to show empty list in "Prepare partitions" page.

So I would like to advice you to start Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD, start terminal and give command:
devkit-disks --dump
In case you see line
usage: raid
in your hard disk devices information lines, although the device is not part of RAID configuration, it may be that Ubuntu 9.10 detects some old RAID configurations from the disk. In my case I was able to remove this RAID configuration information from the disk by zeroing the last blocks of the disk. Be warned, this destroys data from the disk, thus use this only in case you want to reinstall to whole disk. (If you want to keep some old installations or partitions, this is not the way to do it!)
I wrote down the size of sda from the output of
cat /proc/partitions
Then I zeroed the end of the disk:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 skip=<the size of sda - 10> count=10

I would advice to include output of "devkit-disks --dump" to all problems related to "empty list in Prepare partitions page" symptom as it makes problem solving much easier.

[exactt (giesbert)]

Hi Janne,

I also seem to have some RAID remainings on the disk. See attachment. I tried your work-around but I still get the same problem in the installer.

Thx anyway.

[Janne Siren (merjanne-siren)]

Yes, it depends on the type of RAID array. The one which worked for me does not work for all. But I might had something for you. I have not tried this. (And again, please note this deletes the content of the drive, so do not use this in case you want to keep old installations or partitions.) This is just copy paste from:
http://frantisek.rysanek.sweb.cz/pdcraid/pdcraid.html
here it goes...

One last note: if you ever wanted to reuse a drive that once was a member in a Promise RAID, you might want to purge it clean from the remnants of the RAID setup. E.g., the MBR might be modified to save some space at the end of the drive for the RAID superblock, and there could be other Promise-proprietary hacks in the MBR too, which might confuse partitioning and formatting tools and operating systems' filesystem drivers.

Theoretically it should be enough to clean the MBR:
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your_device bs=512 count=1
But it's not a bad idea to wipe a larger block clean, which should take the first partition's boot sector with it:
 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/your_device bs=1k count=10000

[piedramania (piedramania)]

I'm trying to install Lucid, Kubuntu 10.04 beta 2, and I think I'm having the same problem.
Ubiquity hangs when scanning disks. The progress bar stops at 47%, and never go further.

At the same time, the process ksoftirqd/0 uses 100% of the cpu.

Here are the logs from ubiquity:
----------------------------------------------------
/var/log/syslog
----------------------------------------------------
[...]
Apr 13 11:21:45 ubuntu activate-dmraid: No Serial ATA RAID disks detected
Apr 13 11:21:47 ubuntu kernel: [ 1612.911257] sr 8:0:0:0: timing out command, waited 28s
Apr 13 11:21:59 ubuntu kernel: [ 1625.200403] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
Apr 13 11:22:11 ubuntu kernel: [ 1637.280025] end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186393] INFO: task udisks-daemon:3110 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186398] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186401] udisks-daemon D 0000000000000000 0 3110 3109 0x00000000
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186407] ffff8800c0b49c18 0000000000000082 0000000000015b80 0000000000015b80
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186413] ffff880115fa03c0 ffff8800c0b49fd8 0000000000015b80 ffff880115fa0000
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186418] 0000000000015b80 ffff8800c0b49fd8 0000000000015b80 ffff880115fa03c0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186423] Call Trace:
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186433] [<ffffffff8153f3a7>] __mutex_lock_slowpath+0xe7/0x170
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186438] [<ffffffff8153f29b>] mutex_lock+0x2b/0x50
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186443] [<ffffffff81172ef0>] __blkdev_get+0x60/0x3d0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186447] [<ffffffff81173280>] ? blkdev_open+0x0/0xc0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186451] [<ffffffff81173270>] blkdev_get+0x10/0x20
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186454] [<ffffffff811732f1>] blkdev_open+0x71/0xc0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186459] [<ffffffff81140823>] __dentry_open+0x113/0x370
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186464] [<ffffffff8125177f>] ? security_inode_permission+0x1f/0x30
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186468] [<ffffffff8114cbaf>] ? inode_permission+0xaf/0xd0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186472] [<ffffffff81140b97>] nameidata_to_filp+0x57/0x70
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186477] [<ffffffff81150dea>] do_filp_open+0x2da/0xba0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186482] [<ffffffff8105b1b5>] ? wake_up_process+0x15/0x20
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186488] [<ffffffff810c90a3>] ? rcu_start_gp+0x53/0x1a0
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186492] [<ffffffff8115e390>] ? mntput_no_expire+0x30/0x110
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186496] [<ffffffff8115c89a>] ? alloc_fd+0x10a/0x150
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186500] [<ffffffff81140599>] do_sys_open+0x69/0x170
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186504] [<ffffffff811406e0>] sys_open+0x20/0x30
Apr 13 11:22:56 ubuntu kernel: [ 1682.186509] [<ffffffff810131b2>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b
Apr 13 11:23:47 ...

[piedramania (piedramania)]

The ksoftirqd/0 using 100% of one cpu core seems to be because of the cdrom unit (although it is empty)
I'm installing lucid from a hard disks (created using unetbootin). I have tried installing again, this time disconnecting the cdrom unit, and now it works.
Ubiquity stops for a while when scanning disks at 47%, but after few minutes it continues installation normally.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Reviewing your log files attached to this bug report it seems that there is a problem with your installation media (CD/DVD). Please retry your installation with new media and if it still fails I'd recommend testing your CD drive with other media. In the event that is is not in fact an error with your installation media please set the bug's status back to New. Thanks and good luck!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]