ubiquity crashed when installing in an external usb drive

[Adalbert Hanßen]

The installation happened on a Lenovo T530 (with the internal drive taken out toprevent any damage to it).
It also involved a 4TB Toshiba portable storage Model DTX140 4TB +5V DC 1.0A, P/N: HDTX140ESCCA FAC:L A

I tried to install on the external drive. In order to prevent any change to my built-in drive, I removed it before booting from the Xubuntu 20.04.4 amd64-live stick, which was recognized as /dev/sda.

Before the installation, I already had created a partition table for Xubuntu 20.04 (usual installation with a Linux-Sys partition, a small swap partition and a home partition), but I left 4MiB free space before the first partition (just to be sure) instead of the 1Mib which would normally be used.

I was unsure, if a Boot partition is really necessary, but for sure I also provided one with the recommended size of ca 150MiB.

Lots of free space were left on the external drive (not et assigned to any partition, but to be used later when the disk is actually used).

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ lsblk -oname,size,fstype,partflags,label
NAME SIZE FSTYPE PARTFLAGS LABEL
loop0 1,6G squashfs
sda 15G iso9660 Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS amd64
├─sda1 1,8G iso9660 0x80 Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS amd64
├─sda2 3,9M vfat
└─sda3 13,2G ext4 writable
sdb 3,7T
├─sdb1 149,7M ext4
├─sdb2 4G swap
├─sdb3 18,6G ext4
└─sdb4 18,6G ext4
sdc 7,5G
└─sdc1 7,5G vfat 8GB_SANDISK
sr0 1024M
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ ls -l /mnt
insgesamt 115532
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 257734 Feb 7 15:01 config-5.13.0-30-generic
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:31 grub
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Mär 14 10:30 initrd.img -> initrd.img-5.13.0-30-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 101323223 Mär 14 10:30 initrd.img-5.13.0-30-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Mär 14 10:24 initrd.img.old -> initrd.img-5.13.0-30-generic
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Mär 14 10:23 lost+found
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 182704 Aug 18 2020 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 184380 Aug 18 2020 memtest86+.elf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 184884 Aug 18 2020 memtest86+_multiboot.bin
-rw------- 1 root root 5960334 Feb 7 15:01 System.map-5.13.0-30-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Mär 14 10:30 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-5.13.0-30-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10171040 Feb 23 09:58 vmlinuz-5.13.0-30-generic
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ ls -l /mnt
insgesamt 92
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Mär 14 10:24 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:23 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:26 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:47 dev
drwxr-xr-x 137 root root 12288 Mär 14 10:33 etc
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:23 home
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Mär 14 10:24 lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mär 14 10:24 lib32 -> usr/lib32
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mär 14 10:24 lib64 -> usr/lib64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Mär 14 10:24 libx32 -> usr/libx32
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Mär 14 10:23 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:47 media
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:47 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:47 opt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 15 2020 proc
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:30 root
drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:27 run
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Mär 14 10:24 sbin -> usr/sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 18 22:31 snap
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:47 srv
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 15 2020 sys
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Mär 14 10:31 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:48 usr
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Feb 23 09:52 var
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdb3
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb4 /mnt
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ ls -l /mnt
insgesamt 20
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Mär 14 10:23 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 3 1000 1000 4096 Mär 14 10:27 verwalter
xubuntu@xubuntu:~$

It looks like a system has been installed, but to this point I had noch chance to test, if the computer really boots from it.

If needed, I can provide you with screenshots showing all settings during the install (it would be nice, if ubiquity automatically could report all settings made during an install in order to unambiguously document how an installation was made! I would like to provide you some more proposals how ubiquity should be improved, some of them will be easily implemented but have much impact on usability).

Please send me an email if you want more information. Unfortunately I don't see, if there is any additional information which I might extract from logfiles and which might be useful to fix this bug. But I know, that my live stick has a partition "writable" and possibly (hopefully) other information can be extracted from there, if you advise me what to extract.

By the way: this partition "writable" should be made useful to add files, especially *.sh files, in this prtition to be used after installation or even: during the boot process in order to improve some really bad default settings of the freshly installed system, e.g. a colour assigned to "selected text" in a terminal which is in dark blue, almost unreadable, or letting me change the default format for date in Thunar, in terminal sessions, letting the default columns in Thunar be arranged differently (change date first, size second, name, access rights, user, group: one often has to sort things by one of the first columns in my preferred setting. With the normal order, these are somewhere far to the right, so one can not quickly click on the header of the thre columns mentioned first).

Kind regards

Adalbert Hanßen

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: ubiquity 20.04.15.19
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.13.0-30.33~20.04.1-generic 5.13.19
Uname: Linux 5.13.0-30-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.21
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
CasperVersion: 1.445.1
Date: Mon Mar 14 11:08:11 2022
InstallCmdLine: file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed initrd=/casper/initrd quiet splash --- maybe-ubiquity
LiveMediaBuild: Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20220223)
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)