liveCD fails to boot when no hard drives present

[Claude Heiland-Allen]

Using virtualbox-ose on Ubuntu Karmic + Puredyne, with a fresh virtual machine created with *no* hard disk, latest (2009-12-09) -dev iso from rsync fails to boot with an error:

"no root file system is defined: please correct this from the partitioning menu" printed over and over...

ctrl-alt-del => kills an ubiquity process before shutting down.

Removing "automatic-ubiquity" from the kernel boot options line makes it boot to XFCE4 desktop as normal.

[Aymeric Mansoux (aymeric)]

This could be a virtualbox specific problem... or a new bug. I'll try here on a laptop without HD.
The craftivism ISO is known to boot from liveUSB on a machine without disks (that's what we used for the install).

[Claude Heiland-Allen (claudiusmaximus)]

hmm, I think the liveUSB itself would count as a disk, or? Hard to find a machine with only CD and no other disks, I guess.. Adding a virtual disk in virtualbox does workaround the problem.

[krgn (karsten-goto10)]

why do we need to use the 'automatic-ubiquity' boot option anyways? to me that sounds like a potentially hazardous thing, athough of course I don't understand what it actually does.

[Claude Heiland-Allen (claudiusmaximus)]

http://www.joerg-seyfried.de/2009/11/preseeding-ubuntu-karmic/ explains some things.

[Claude Heiland-Allen (claudiusmaximus)]

SO: the automatic-ubiquity kernel command line option DOES start ubiquity on boot, and it fails because it can't open the "default display".

This is undesirable, not least because it takes 20 seconds from starting ubiquity to it failing.

[Claude Heiland-Allen (claudiusmaximus)]

fixed in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~puredyne-team/broth/devel/revision/349