subiquity

Bug #1969822
Comment #7

Comment 7 for bug 1969822

Revision history for this message

Dan Bungert (dbungert) wrote on 2022-04-22:

Thanks again for the logs Fernan, I now believe I understand what happened.

About your item #1 ("starting with fresh disks")
It's our expectation that most people will, when faced with a blank disk or one they are reformatting, will use the "Add Partition" on the "Free Space" area under a disk to add one or more partitions. It's also a good idea to proactively "Use as Boot device" from the menu on a disk to have more control over where that boot device ends up - the first time you add a partition to a disk, Subiquity will notice that nothing is setup for boot yet and try to help with that, which may or may not match your intentions.

The problem you ran into was using the "Format" option from the disk, not the "Free Space" area. "Format" on an empty disk results in an obscure option to setup the disk for formatting and mounting directly, without an partition table. And given that when you dropped to a shell you created partition tables, I'm guessing the direct format and mount of the disks isn't what you had in mind.

About item #2 ("even after formatting the disks in the shell"), that one is more challenging. Subiquity is trying to prevent people from losing data - maybe you're mounting a partition at "/" and it already has data there - the install process is going to wipe out some of that! When Subiquity is in charge of creating the partitions starting from free space, you can do this more simply (Free Space -> Add Partition -> choose Format and Mount options). To go back to a state of a blank disk one can use the Disk -> Reformat option, which will reverse your steps manually done on the command line but will also let the installer clearly know that there isn't data on that disk that needs to be preserved.

I completely agree that this is a User Experience issue and will keep this bug around to investigate if we can do this better. In particular I think the Disk -> Format option is confusing. In the meantime I hope the above helps you to get your VM going.

Thanks again for the logs Fernan, I now believe I understand what happened.

About your item #1 ("starting with fresh disks")
It's our expectation that most people will, when faced with a blank disk or one they are reformatting, will use the "Add Partition" on the "Free Space" area under a disk to add one or more partitions.  It's also a good idea to proactively "Use as Boot device" from the menu on a disk to have more control over where that boot device ends up - the first time you add a partition to a disk, Subiquity will notice that nothing is setup for boot yet and try to help with that, which may or may not match your intentions.

The problem you ran into was using the "Format" option from the disk, not the "Free Space" area.  "Format" on an empty disk results in an obscure option to setup the disk for formatting and mounting directly, without an partition table.  And given that when you dropped to a shell you created partition tables, I'm guessing the direct format and mount of the disks isn't what you had in mind.

About item #2 ("even after formatting the disks in the shell"), that one is more challenging.  Subiquity is trying to prevent people from losing data - maybe you're mounting a partition at "/" and it already has data there - the install process is going to wipe out some of that!  When Subiquity is in charge of creating the partitions starting from free space, you can do this more simply (Free Space -> Add Partition -> choose Format and Mount options).  To go back to a state of a blank disk one can use the Disk -> Reformat option, which will reverse your steps manually done on the command line but will also let the installer clearly know that there isn't data on that disk that needs to be preserved.

I completely agree that this is a User Experience issue and will keep this bug around to investigate if we can do this better.  In particular I think the Disk -> Format option is confusing.  In the meantime I hope the above helps you to get your VM going.