Hurd 1 Alternative installation: partition manager fails under specific circumstances

[kevin]

While installing Kubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 1 I noticed that the partition manager failed (it displays weird entries and refuses to display the dialog to alter the partitions). I think it's because I had two partitions on my disk, which were created with Windows XP. They were not formatted, but had the partition ID for FAT 16.

Solution:
I altered the partition IDs with fdisk and formatted the partitions. Now the partition manager works again.

[Mark Honman (wania-mark)]

A further report on what is probably the same bug.

Target: HP NC6120 (centrino) laptop with Windows XP Professional, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD.

The first partitioner screen gave a number of options, of which the first two were quite odd:
0
Guided - resize cdrom-retriever and use freed space

Selecting any of the Guided options brings up the Partition disks screen, which shows the actual disk partition scheme (not a proposed scheme as for the 6.06 LTS alternate CD).

The first option on this screen is the same as the option that was selected from the list on the previous screen. There is also an odd option at the end of the screen just above "Undo changes to partitions": SCSI (,,) ()

Selecting anything on this screen brings up a warning:
"No partition table changes and no creation of file systems have been planned".
If one goes back to the partitioning screen, the Windows partition description is overwritten by the message "10 partman/filesystem_short/ntfs doesn't exist #%s 21."

Could it be that the partitioner wierdness has something to do with the libata changes I've heard about (i.e. that even PATA drives now look like SCSI drives to the kernel)?

Some more info:

Laptop has wireless and wired LAN - problem experienced with wired LAN both connected & disconnected.

Attempted to do text installation from Alternate i386 CD (similar problems experienced with command-line installation).

At the first attempt the system had a factory default XP Pro installation, with the entire disk occupied by an 80GB NTFS partition. The intention was to resize the partition and install Ubuntu on the freed-up space.

Since that failed, Acronis True Image v8 was used to replace the NTFS partition with one 20GB in size. Then Windows was used to create two further primary partitions - 24GB unformatted and 32GB FAT32. The unformatted partition was deleted - the space being intended for the Ubuntu installation.

Test was repeated one more time, asking the Ubuntu partitioner to just erase and use the entire hard disk. As in the previous cases, a partitioner screen came up showing the partitions, but selecting any entry in it resulted in the "No partition table changes" message being displayed.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Could you boot the installer with the "DEBCONF_DEBUG=5" kernel argument, reproduce this bug, extract /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman from the running installer, and attach them to this bug? There's a "Save debug logs" item on the main menu which you can use to extract the log files.

[Mark Honman (wania-mark)]

I'll be a while before I can get back to you with the logs, as the laptop is presently acting as a temporary server! Should be 1-2 weeks.

[Mark Honman (wania-mark)]

Here are the logs as requested.The problem also occurs with Herd 2, and these logs are from that installation attempt.

Unfortunately I won't be able to do further tests on this machine... and I could not reproduce the problem on a different centrino machine (the 2nd machine had a different partition layout).

We normally use a Linux-based disk replication program (Acronis), and on bootup on the NC6120 we se a message
ide2: ports already in use, skipping

This might point to some hardware weirdness on the machine - perhaps its built-in card reader?

[Mark Honman (wania-mark)]

syslog attachment

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for the logs. I eventually diagnosed this following bug 89004, and it's fixed in the Feisty beta.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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