Comment 11 for bug 37430

I have had two similar occurences.

First was on a Dell desktop machine (can get the exact spec, but it was a dual Xeon job). I was installing using the gksudo "update-manager -d" command as mentioned in the ubuntu upgrade notice (after doing a full upgrade in aptitude to make sure everything was up to date). The machine (as well as the second one I will get to in a minute) was a Kubuntu CD install on to which I then installed the full Ubuntu package.

All was going well untill I hit the modprobe hang that the other user has mentioned above. I also killed the pcmcia-cs process and the installation proceeded fine. There was another hang later on another configure step, but I Ctrl-C 'd that and things carried on smoothley. An initial boot tried to use the old 686 SMP kernel on the machine and seg-faulted everywhere (something I assume will go away when there is an up to date 686 SMP kernel), so I rebooted in to the standard 686 kernel. This booted fine (and very quickly :) ) but I could then not run adept (package library was locked). I fell back to aptitude to see if that would work and it told me to runk 'dpkg --configure -a' which I did. This unlocked the system but ended up with some failed packages caused by kcontrol not configuring properly. Eventually (and for no apparent reason) after a few attempts to re-install kcontrol it suddenly configured itself properly and everything now works fine!

Buoyed by this success I decided to try the same process at home (Dual Athlon MP 1600's with 1Gb Ram on an Asus A7M266-D). The installation fell over at the PCMCIA stage as it had on my work PC, but unlike on the Dell I could not start a terminal or anything to kill the runaway process. As a result I had to shut down the PC mid-upgrade and now it hangs every time it tries to boot with the "Starting PCMCIA message" (this is the second PCMCIA message - there is already a "Start PCMCIA [failed]" entry in the boot text). Anyway, the result is currently a dead system (unless my search for booting with PCMCIA dissabled proves fruitful).

So that's my experience, hope there is a clue to what's going on in there somewhere (I know how hard debugging this kind of thing can be). My guess whould be some concurrency issue in the modprobe and the rest of these issues are just resulting symptoms, but I know how annoying having "customers" trying to guess the causes of their bugs can be, so I'll keep quiet ;)