Comment 9 for bug 1273296

I looked at the console log of the system that failed installation, and found the following. This would have also been seen in /var/log/cloud-init-output.log.

So the issue here I think is that something had the first disk busy (possibly mounted) so th BLKRRPART ioctl could not complete.

Cloud-init v. 0.7 running 'modules:final' at Tue, 28 Jan 2014 08:34:12 +0000. Up 16.87 seconds.
failed to partition /dev/sda [
Disk /dev/sda: 364801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
 /dev/sda: unrecognized partition table type
Old situation:
No partitions found
New situation:
Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 5860533167 5860531120 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 0 - 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 Empty
Successfully wrote the new partition table

Re-reading the partition table ...
BLKRRPART: Device or resource busy
The command to re-read the partition table failed.
Run partprobe(8), kpartx(8) or reboot your system now,
before using mkfs
If you created or changed a DOS partition, /dev/foo7, say, then use dd(1)
to zero the first 512 bytes: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/foo7 bs=512 count=1
(See fdisk(8).)]
Unexpected error while running command.
Command: ('partition', '/dev/sda')
Exit code: 1
Reason: -
Stdout: ''
Stderr: ''
Unexpected error while running command.
Command: ['curtin', 'block-meta', 'simple']
Exit code: 3
Reason: -
Stdout: ''
Stderr: ''
2014-01-28 08:34:13,528 - util.py[WARNING]: Failed running /var/lib/cloud/instance/scripts/part-001 [3]