Partitioner can't find hard drive on second IDE controller during install

[Dave Rosky]

My motherboard does not support ATA133, so my system has no hard drives on IDE
channels 1 and 2 on the motherboard. Instead, the hard drive is attached to a
the first channel of a Promise IDE controller on a PCI card (It appears as
/dev/hde in my Fedora installation). When the Ubuntu installer gets to the
partitioner (parted?), it fails to detect the drive and displays nothing except
"??? ???". It works fine on a similar system that does have a hard drive
attached to the motherboard IDE channels.

[Dave Rosky (d-rosky)]

(In reply to comment #0)

Forgot to mention, the verison of Ubuntu is 5.10 preview.

Dave

[Dave Rosky (d-rosky)]

I think I might have found part of the problem. The driver module needed for
the Promise IDE controller in my system is pdc202xx_new, but it appears that the
installer loads pdc202xx_old instead, based on the list displayed in expert
mode. Is there a way to force the installer to load pdc202xx_new instead?

Dave

[Dave Rosky (d-rosky)]

More info:

During install, I ran a shell and made sure pdc202xx_new was
loaded (as well as pdc202xx_old), but the installer still cannot
see the hard drive on the third IDE channel (/dev/hde) :-( I'm out
of ideas, let me know if there is any other thing I should try to
help debug this.

NOTE: I tried the live CD and I can access the drive after it
boots, so this seems to be an installation related issue.

Dave

[Dave Rosky (d-rosky)]

Was this the wrong category to file this bug?

If so, please inform which would be the best.

Dave

[Dave Rosky (d-rosky)]

Additional note:

The new installer on the latest Breezy install CD (Colony 5)
still has this issue. I still can't install Ubuntu on my
desktop system.

Question: When the partition manager displays "???? ????", does
that mean it couldn't find a drive, or that it found a drive
but couldn't understand the partition table?

Regards
Dave

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> The new installer on the latest Breezy install CD (Colony 5)
> still has this issue. I still can't install Ubuntu on my
> desktop system.

Could you please attach /var/log/partman from the installer to this bug? If you
select "go back" until you get to the installer's main menu, there's a "Save
debug logs" menu item that should help with getting this file out.

> Question: When the partition manager displays "???? ????", does
> that mean it couldn't find a drive, or that it found a drive
> but couldn't understand the partition table?

It means the partition manager has gone mad and crashed. I hope the log file
above should help me figure out why.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Hi all,

If you are suffering from this bug, please follow these instructions to get me
debugging information:

1) If you can spare the machine in question for a while, please try not to "fix"
the partitioning such that this bug goes away. I consider this the most serious
installer bug currently open, and I'd like to make sure that people can continue
to reproduce this bug until it's been properly fixed.

2) Download
http://people.ubuntu.com/~cjwatson/tmp/13250/breezy-install-i386-debug.iso; this
is not a real installation CD, because I've removed all the .debs from it in
order to make it reasonably quick for people to download (it's 35MB). However,
it does contain the installer, with a modified partman-base package that prints
extra debugging information to /var/log/partman during the code paths that seem
to be crashing.

3) Burn this to CD, and boot from it.

4) Run through the installer in the usual way until you reach the "Partition
disks" stage. At this point, either you will see the main menu (in which case
the bug isn't reproducible for you) or it will fail as before.

5) If it fails, please extract /var/log/partman as before and attach it to this
bug. You can do this by, for example, pressing Alt-F2, entering 'anna-install
openssh-client-udeb' to install scp in the installer's ramdisk, and then using
scp to copy that file to another machine.

Thanks in advance.

[Dave Rosky (d-rosky)]

Created an attachment (id=4209)
partman log file

Attached is the partman log file obtained using the test
installer. Hope this helps...
Dave

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Attached is the partman log file obtained using the test
> installer. Hope this helps...

It certainly did, thank you! I now know that this is the same bug as #13250, and
I have a fix on its way. See that bug for further commentary.

This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 36213.