Partman looks confused by the virtual disk name on the EC2 (/dev/xvda1)

[Charles Plessy]

Hello,

I am trying to install Ubuntu on the EC2 from scratch by booting on a preseeded debian-installer (see http://charles.plessy.org/Debian/debi%C3%A2neries/nuage/) that starts the SSH network-console.

Using the Oneiric installer, this strategy works well until disk partitioning. The EBS volume of the instance is detected as /dev/xvda1 (not /dev/xvda). Partman then partitions this as the following:

Disk /dev/xvda1: 1073 MB, 1073741824 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders, total 2097152 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e9d61

      Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/xvda1p1 2048 1161215 579584 83 Linux
/dev/xvda1p2 1163262 2095103 465921 5 Extended
/dev/xvda1p5 1163264 1370111 103424 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/xvda1p6 1372160 2095103 361472 83 Linux

Unfortunately, the formatting can not be started because of the following error:

Error informing the kernel about modifications to partition /dev/xvda1p1 -- Invalid argument. This means Linux won't know about any changes you made to /dev/xvda1p1 until you reboot -- so you shouldn't mount it or use it in any way before rebooting.

During its preparation, the EBS volume from which the installer was booted was not partitioned and was formatted as a ext2 filesystem on the whole disk (/dev/sdb). It was booted accordingly with the aki-ec5df7ed kernel and ‘root (hd0)’ in GRUB (see above blog post).

The Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/637784 is probably related to this.

Have a nice day,

--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan

[Charles Plessy (plessy)]

Dear Ubuntu developers,

I have tried again with the netboot images 20101020ubuntu108 for precise, and confirm that the problem is still there. Partman makes a new partition table, but /dev only contains an entry for xvda1 and not xvda1p1, 2, 5 and 6, and therefore the formatting fails.

Is it a bug in Partman, or do you think it should be reassigned somewhere else ?

Have a nice day,

-- Charles Plessy, Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan.

[Charles Plessy (plessy)]

Just for the record, here is the preseed file I use.