The Installer does not see existing partitions

[zettberlin]

After booting the live-cd for kubuntu karmic (beta downloaded on october the 8th 09) starting ubiquity works OK until the partitioning. Choosing manual partitioning I have to wait for some 2-3 minutes, then the partitioner offers to use the complete disk.

The HD is partitioned using the installer of OpenSuse 11.1. No RAID LVM or other fancy stuff - just 3 ext3-partitions and one swap. Those partitions are perfectly available in the live-session. I can see, mount and use them in Dolphin.

Ubiquity does not see any of those partitions and only offers to make a new partition-table.

cfdisk (run as root via sudo) can see all the partitions and list them correctly (see attachement). But after trying to run Ubiquity it fails and shows: FATAL ERROR cannot read disk drive. It is also not possible anymore to mount the partitions in Dolphin after running Ubiquity.

I get the very same problem using the alternate installer and also the same with Debian 5 netinstall. 64Studio3beta (based on Gutsy) sees and uses the partitions perfectly well.

[zettberlin (zettberlin)]

One more info if needed: I try to install the 64bit-Kubuntu, but as Debian i386 Netinstall fails just the same, I fear this makes no major difference...

[Evan (ev)]

Please run the installer in debug mode (`ubiquity -d` from a konsole window) and attach /var/log/syslog, /var/log/partman, and /var/log/installer/debug once you get to the advanced partitioning page.

Thanks!

[zettberlin (zettberlin)]

OK - here are the requested files :-)

[Evan (ev)]

This appears to be either a kernel bug or broken hardware. I'm moving this over to the kernel team so they can determine if it's the former.

[zettberlin (zettberlin)]

Broken hardware -- hmmm since older/other Linux-installers do not have any problems with the board/hd I would not suspect this. Reviewing the syslog though makes me think of a regression in the kernel...

BTW: the Suse111 that is already installed (and working perfectly well) runs with a pae-realtime kernel 2.6.31 from Jan Engelhardt. Installation and partitioning was done with Suses standard 2.6.27.

[Luke Maurer (luke-maurer)]

I'm seeing exactly the same symptoms on regular (non-K) Ubuntu, only I'd just partitioned the disk using gparted (and fdisk, to fix the partition order). Also, I've got Windows XP running on an NTFS partition (which I'd just resized). I can attach those logs if it'd help.

Is there a workaround? I'd love to be rid of Windows on this damned machine ...

[Luke Maurer (luke-maurer)]

!! I thought to try installing Jaunty instead and upgrading to Karmic, but I found the problem is still there in the Jaunty installer's partitioner. What's more, on the Jaunty LiveCD, gparted has the same problem! Is that any kind of hint?

(If I run parted in the terminal and try to list partitions, it just says "Error: Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition.")

So Zett, did you ever try it with Jaunty? If we are indeed seeing the same bug, this strongly suggests it's not the kernel after all.

[Luke Maurer (luke-maurer)]

Just did some Googling, and it looks like the key for me was that I used fdisk to fix the partition order. Did you ever do that on that disk? Reportedly it screws up parted ... good to know ...

Ah! Just now tried deleting the last partition with fdisk and reallocating it. Seems it really was too close to the previous one. (Fortunately it was a swap partition, so I didn't have to worry about the data.)

So I guess the lesson for me is not to use that reorder command in fdisk on logical partitions; you wind up with overlap. (Now to complain to the parted guys; I wish it'd just create the partitions in the right order to begin with, no matter what order I define them in ...)

Does that help, Zett?

[penalvch (penalvch)]

zettberlin, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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