installer fails when updating boot partition and/or boot directory

[Karen Spearel]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

This crash is prolly caused by my not allowing the installer to format the boot partition. I just want the installer to put the kernel and initrd in my current boot partition without wiping out the current data there ... ie the currently working grub install and ubuntu 8.10 & crunchbang 8.10 kernels, initrds, configs, etc. It would be nice if it would just drop its kernel in the existing /boot partition and add a stanza to to my existing but slightly modified grub/menu.lst, especially since this is a beta release that deserves more testing but is perhaps not something you want for every day use. This would seems like a fairly common use case. If it matters, the boot partition is Ext2 since I don't want it journaled .

I have now tried to install the Ubuntu 9.04 beta keeping the default boot installation options ie let it install in /boot under the root directory and install grub) and it fails in seemingly the same manner. In both this case and the case above, vmlinuz and all the other stuff normally installed is there *except* the initrd.

Perhaps it should have been noted that both attempted installs were via PXEboot with the ISO exported over nfs so perhaps this is part of the problem. This laptop has a dead DVD/CD drive thus I can't install directly from the CD. The live CDs seem to run fine as does the installer otherwise

ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.6
Package: ubiquity 1.11.20
ProcAttrCurrent: unconfined
ProcCmdline: /usr/bin/python /usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity gtk_ui
ProcEnviron: Error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/proc/5116/environ'
PythonArgs: ['/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity', 'gtk_ui']
SourcePackage: ubiquity
Title: ubiquity crashed with InstallStepError in configure_bootloader()
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686
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