Comment 0 for bug 1582899

Sysadmin reported in #ubuntu (later #ubuntu-kernel) the 16.04 ubuntu-server failed due to being unable to configure linux-image-4.4.0-21-generic.

Lots of diagnostics and one SSH remote session later we seem to have narrowed it down to the installer.

The cause of the error message appears to be that the symlink names in /dev/disk/by-uuid/ haven't been updated after the partitioning stage if there were pre-existing partitions and file-systems on the install device, *and* the sysadmin chose to format the existing partitions when selecting mountpoints.

In this case a hardware RAID device presents:

/dev/sda1 (/boot/)
/dev/sda2 (swap)
/dev/sda3 (/)

From the shell I noticed:

root@tmpstorage:/# ll /dev/disk/by-uuid/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 May 17 19:39 130e4419-4bfd-46d2-87f9-62e5379bf591 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 May 17 19:39 127d3fa1-c07c-48e4-9e26-1b926d37625c -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 May 17 19:39 78b88456-2b0b-4265-9ed2-5db61522d887 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 May 17 19:39 2016-04-20-22-45-29-00 -> ../../sr1
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 May 17 19:39 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 May 17 19:39 .

root@tmpstorage:/# blkid /dev/sda*
/dev/sda: PTUUID="a84e60fd" PTTYPE="dos"
/dev/sda1: UUID="61365714-8ff7-47a2-8035-8aed9e3191a6" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-01"
/dev/sda2: UUID="78b88456-2b0b-4265-9ed2-5db61522d887" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-02"
/dev/sda3: UUID="75f68451-9472-47c7-9efc-ed032bfa9987" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-03"

More details to follow.