Installation of 9.10 freezes during hard drive search

[Asdragur]

Version: Ubuntu Live CD (9.10)

Symptoms: Installation running smoothly. A window appears "searching/examining hard drives" - cannot remember the wording. At reproducible 47% the progress bar stops and some seconds later the screen freezes. No possibility to get out of this. The point where I can choose between automatic/manual partitioning is never reached.

System: Asus P5Q, two SATA drives (250GB, 1000GB), AHCI mode, two DVD drives, PATA.

Tests done: none of the given boot options resolves this bug. Neither changing AHCI mode to IDE. Bug occurs installing in graphical mode, in text mode and directly from booted live system. There is no problem accessing the two disc drives from the live system.

[WeatherGod (ben-v-root)]

Moving this bug report to ubuquity

[Monkey (monkey-libre)]

Please give more information, I´ve added a link for that. Thank You for making Ubuntu better

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUbiquity/AttachingLogs

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Please specify which additional information would help. All which is observable is noted above, but I am willing to do additional tests. An installation of a recent OpenSuse did work, so I don't think it's a problem with my computer and Linux at all.

[Monkey (monkey-libre)]

The /var/log/syslog file

On newer systems (6.10 and up) this is often the most important file and should be attached to crash reports.

After installation, this is saved as /var/log/installer/syslog.

The /var/log/partman file

If the installer crashes at or beyond the partition stage (the re-organizing of your hard disk), then this file is also likely to be important.

After installation, this is saved as /var/log/installer/partman.

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Am 30.01.2010 23:14, schrieb Monkey:
> The /var/log/syslog file
>
> On newer systems (6.10 and up) this is often the most important file and
> should be attached to crash reports.
>
> After installation, this is saved as /var/log/installer/syslog.
>
> The /var/log/partman file
>
> If the installer crashes at or beyond the partition stage (the re-
> organizing of your hard disk), then this file is also likely to be
> important.
>
> After installation, this is saved as /var/log/installer/partman.
>
>

As the installation is not working at all and the computer freezes even
before partitioning is started I don't have a chance to get to those log
files (if it should be possible, please tell me how).

[Monkey (monkey-libre)]

If you're still at the LiveCD environment the files will be in /var/log/

If you've had just installed the System the files will be in /var/log/installer

Click Add a comment/attachment at the bottom of the bug webpage.

Clicking Browse will open a file browser in your ubuntu home directory. Click on the disk icon to get to the base of the file system and then the var and log folders to get to /var/log.

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Am 31.01.2010 10:45, schrieb Monkey:
> If you're still at the LiveCD environment the files will be in /var/log/
>
> If you've had just installed the System the files will be in
> /var/log/installer
>
> Click Add a comment/attachment at the bottom of the bug webpage.
>
> Clicking Browse will open a file browser in your ubuntu home directory.
> Click on the disk icon to get to the base of the file system and then
> the var and log folders to get to /var/log.
>
>
Frozen means: the system is not responding at all. No chance to get to
the log file.

[ZhengPeng Hou (zhengpeng-hou)]

@Asdragur
Do you have a chance to provide more details about your testing machine?

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Am 07.03.2010 13:37, schrieb ZhengPeng Hou:
> @Asdragur
> Do you have a chance to provide more details about your testing machine?
>
>
What more details would you need?

Regards

Dirk

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

I just did some experiments. Using the alternate installation iso I utilized the expert mode and executed all installation steps just to the point before partition detection. I then replaced all the tools doing the partitioning (partman and so on) by dummies. To continue I had to create an fstab myself - worked fine. The rest of the installation was no problem.

Booting Ubuntu works, login also. But after some minutes of working I get the same freeze as I experienced before. Symptoms: no mouse movement possible, no keyboard change to a terminal session. The drive led is constantly burning, but there are no noises of moving heads.

Booting to an xterm session works without problems, tried this for more than 30 minutes.

Anything I can provide to help? I am a little bit disappointed, that my problem seems not worth working on it. Ubuntu is not usable for me now. I found rare bug reports in the net reporting the same problem.

Kind regards

Dirk

[Monkey (monkey-libre)]

Please try with Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 final release and don´t think that, there are opened 78883 bugs, the Ubuntu developers work very hard every day.

Thank You for making Ubuntu better.

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Is there a backport of ubiquity for 9.10? I will try 10.04 for sure, but I recently bought some mirror CDs for 9.10 (my internet is kind of slow...)

[Monkey (monkey-libre)]

Sorry, ubiquity is only the installer but You need all system and packages. I think the best way for downloading is the torrent and patience.

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

I downloaded the alternate kubuntu 10.04 final iso and tried the installation. Unfortunately this has the exactly same effect. So the bug applies to 10.04 also.

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Interestingly this bug does not only affect recent Ubuntu distributions, but also Debian 5.04. The bug occurs also during hard drive detection. Using another distribution like Suse 11.2 works perfectly.

[Asdragur (registrierung-deactivatedaccount)]

Unfortunately your advice to switch to 10.04 did not show any effect. A try with a recent Debian (5.04) crashed at exactly the same position (detection of hard drives). A recent Suse (11.2) works fine.

I really liked Ubuntu (in previous versions), so please help me to get it running. Any clue to extract some information out of a totally frozen system is highly appreciated.

Somewhat frustrated...

Dirk