installer crashed

[Buttay]

I tried to install ubuntu from the desktop-6.06-i686 live cdrom on a relatively old machine (Duron 600, 256 Meg, TNT2 graphics).

The live CD works fairly well (except it is slow, but I guess I need more memory...), and apparently everything is properly detected.

The locale is set to english with a french keyboard, and as this machine hosts several OS, the hard disk partitionning is fairly complicated (15 partitions). the / partition is only 1GB, but /usr and /var are 4GB each. The swap is 512MB and /home is several GB.

Once the installation is lauched (I mean after the 6 steps for configuration), the installer warned me that therewas an error on partition 1 (/boot), asked if I want to continue, and once I agreed, crashed with the following message:

We're sorry; the installer crashed. Please file a bug report at https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+filebug and a developer will attend to the problem as soon as possible. To help the developers understand what went wrong, include the following detail in your bug report, and attach the files /var/log/installer/syslog, /var/log/syslog, and /var/log/partman:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 130, in ?
    install(sys.argv[1])
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 55, in install
    ret = wizard.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 264, in run
    self.progress_loop()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 538, in progress_loop
    raise RuntimeError, ("Install failed with exit code %s; see "
RuntimeError: Install failed with exit code 1; see /var/log/installer/syslog and /var/log/syslog

Cyril

[Buttay (cyril-buttay)]

the corresponding /var/log/installer/syslog file

[Buttay (cyril-buttay)]

The corresponding /vqr/log/syslog

[Buttay (cyril-buttay)]

the corresponding /var/log/partman

[Buttay (cyril-buttay)]

I've just ran fsck on each partition, and no error where found. (command sudo fsck /dev/hdaX)

[Buttay (cyril-buttay)]

The installation worked fine with the following modifications compared to the previous attempt:
- / partition extended to 2GB, as it is recommended,
- all partitions have been formated, including /, /boot (the one on which the installer found errors), /home. In the first attempt, only /usr and /var were formated, as I tried to keep the configuration files from Breezy (the upgrade breezy-> dapper failed, but I think I made too many modifications to my setup to be able to fill a useful bug report).

I suppose the main problem was the error found on /dev/hda1 (/boot). But this should have raised an error, not a crash!

Anyway, thanks for your work, I hope this report will be useful for further improvements,

Cyril

[Jochen Bartl (l.o.b.o)]

The installer crashed in my first installation also with this error message. The problem was that grub can't boot from an xfs partition and the installer just crashes. I use now ext2 for /boot and everything is fine.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Moving to Ubuntu ubiquity.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. At present, you must reformat system partitions (e.g. /, /boot, /usr, or /var) during installation; the fact that the partitioner doesn't warn you about this is also bug 47046, and is fixed in 6.06.1. If you are upgrading an existing installation, then please see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperUpgrades rather than using this installer.