Comment 22 for bug 49178

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 23:05 +0000, GeorgeAmbrose wrote:
> In my case xfs and ntfs had nothing to do with the bug. It had everything to do with trying to use an
> old /var partition. For some reason the installer only wants to work on cleanly formatted system
> partitions like '/', and '/var'.
>
> In my case I was trying to reuse an old '/var' (which had my web pages inside /var/www), and kubuntu
> would have none of it. So I used a different idle partition as a new '/var', and formatted it, and it
> worked. That was the only thing that changed between it not working and then beginning to work.
>
Yes, in fact my circumstances were identical to what you just described.
I was trying to reuse an old /var partition.

The crash happened very late in the whole installation, and I already
had a 386-platform Dapper that had been running flawlessly for several
months. So I booted the old installation, and
revised /boot/grub/menu.lst to point to the new AMD64-platform
installation. That worked.

But the more I thought about the consequences of trying to share a /var
partition, the less I liked what I was imagining. So I made a new
installation from scratch, without referencing the old /var partition.
And this time the installer didn't crash.

The only difference was the /var partition, just as you observed.