Ubiquity gets stuck when there is an unformatted/unrecognized partition

[Erik B. Andersen]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Ubiquity will do nothing when you click forward on the second screen (the screen where it checks if you have a power supply, internet connection, etc) if you have an unformatted partition. It gives no error but just sits there, forever. I get this error running the daily image from 3/2/2011.

To reproduce:
Make a partition on your hard drive that is unformatted (has no filesystem). The one I had was a logical partition, but I doubt that matters.
Start ubiquity and try to do a normal install. You will get stuck on the page where it checks to see if you have an Internet connection, etc. Specifically, if you press forward, nothing happens, and the cursor looks busy.
Close Ubiquity.
Format the unformatted partition.
Open Ubiquity and try to get past where you were stuck before.

Please note:There is more debugging information in the duplicate bug #723990 in case you need it.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: ubiquity 2.5.22 [modified: lib/partman/automatically_partition/question]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-5.32-generic 2.6.38-rc6
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-5-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Mar 2 17:19:57 2011
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Alpha amd64 (20110302)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Brandon Wamboldt (brandon-wamboldt-gmail)]

I removed all unformatted partitions and still experienced this issue, however one of my hard drives has a TrueCrypt partition which shows up as a partition with an Unknown file system in GParted so I assume it would cause the same problem as an unformatted partition.

[Bernard Decock (decockbernard)]

Dialy build 20110309. This bug can be easily generated when using a new VirtualDisk (vdi) in VirtualBox. The installer hangs after the 2nd step. After formatting the drive (eg. by means of System->Administration->DiiskUtility), one can install Ubuntu.

[Alessio Fattorini (alessio.fattorini)]

I confirm this bug, with comment #4 i have resolved my problem.

[Hansen (moteprime)]

In Natty desktop i386 ISO dated 17. march the installer does not hang anymore.
On my laptop the installation completes successfully on my desktop in crashes during "Installing system", but I suspect that its caused by my graphics adapter being Nvidia.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I fixed this recently with a couple of changes:

partman-auto (93ubuntu10) natty; urgency=low

  * Guard against blkid returning non-zero (LP: #729394).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:39:58 +0000

ubiquity (2.5.27) natty; urgency=low

  * Drop code related to debian-installer/fallbacklocale, since that
    template no longer exists (LP: #736060).
  * Update imported translations from gtk+2.0 2.24.3-0ubuntu2 and
    gnome-panel 1:2.32.1-0ubuntu6.
  * Ensure that PartedServer dialogs are always properly closed on
    exceptional paths.
  * Fix partition-table-full check to cope with disks without a partition
    table.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:36:02 +0000