Comment 164 for bug 445852

Here is a tested procedure for getting an uncorrupted Karmic system installed onto a netbook (tested on my ASUS Eee PC 900).

Installing Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 UNR on a system with an affected SSD

1) Boot from a live Ubuntu "Karmic" 9.10 USB stick or SD card.

2) If the SSD has been trashed by previous encounters with the bug, it may need to be wiped to eliminate bad blocks. Open a terminal and issue the following command (this assumes the SSD mounts to "/dev/sda" -- you must be certain of the device name on your system because everything on it will be erased):

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

3) After step 2 finishes (it can take awhile), launch the "Install Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.10" application (ubiquity) and install Ubuntu to your SSD. (If you have sufficient RAM, choose a custom partition and install a single "/" (root) partition without any swap space. I recommend using ext3 or the default ext4. Some recommend usig ext2, however, in my experience it does not recover from crash problems gracefully.)

4) When the installer finishes, a dialog will come up suggesting you can restart now. Don't restart yet! While that dialog is open, the install partition should still be mounted at /target ... HOWEVER if you already closed the dialog, open a Terminal and mount the partition:

$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /target

5) Now chroot into the target system

$ sudo chroot /target

6) The terminal is chrooted into the target system as root (no need for sudo). You can now divert the problematic file on the target system:

# dpkg-divert --divert --add --rename --divert /lib/udev/devkit-disks-probe-ata-smart.bak /lib/udev/devkit-disks-probe-ata-smart

7) Now create a file. You will type three lines directly into the file, finishing with a control-D. (If you make a mistake that you can't fix using backspace, close the file with control-D and use nano or vim to edit the file.)

# cat > /lib/udev/devkit-disks-probe-ata-smart
#!/bin/bash
#
exit 0
[type control-D here]

8) Make the new file executable:

# chmod 755 /lib/udev/devkit-disks-probe-ata-smart

9) exit the chroot and terminal

# exit
$ exit

10) Shutdown, remove the USB stick or SD card, and boot into the new system. Install all software updates as needed.

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After you know this bug has been fixed AND after the correct updated devicekit-disks package has been installed on your system, you can re-enable it using these commands:

$ sudo rm /lib/udev/devkit-disks-probe-ata-smart
$ sudo dpkg-divert --rename --remove /lib/udev/devkit-disks-probe-ata-smart

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