[Edgy Eft]Manual partitioning not possible at installation

[Nico Veenkamp]

When I choose manual partitioning on my Acer Travelmate 4001 Laptop, when installing Edgy Eft, the installer just hangs. I see the spinning disc icon with only the cancel button active.

When I used the partitioner from the system menu to delete the relevant partition I see in the installation dialog where you can decide how tpartition your hard disc an extra option to use the free space. Even when I select that option I can not get any further.

This bug is probably related to Bug#48319 but on request from Colin I file it here as a separate bug.

[Nico Veenkamp (nico)]

This bug also occurs in Edgy Eft knot 2.

[Aigars Mahinovs (aigarius)]

I have the same problem with Knot2 on Dell XPS M1710. It has a ICH-7 SATA hard drive, in case that matters. And GParted starts up just fine from the same knot2 livecd.
Erasing a partition to free up the space and selecting "Use the largest continuous free space" hangs too in the same way.

[Timothy Miller (theosib)]

I'm using the "Alternative install" CD for Kubuntu, Edgy Eft, Knot 2. I have two 120GB drives (PATA, Seagate), and I'm trying to set up software RAID1 across them. I have an Athlon 2800+ with a KT400 chipset.

Here are the steps I follow:

1) [All of the setup prior to the partitioner starting.]
[The partitioner always spends about a minute at 38% doing no CD or disk access.]
2) Manually edit partition table
3) Select the first drive
4) Create new empty partition table
5) Select second drive
6) Create new empty partition table
7) Select FREE SPACE on first drive
8) Create new partition [119.0 GB, Primary, Beginning]
9) Use as: physical volume for RAID
10) Bootable flag: on
11) Done setting up the partition
12) Select remaining free space on first drive
13) [Set it up as swap]
14) [Repeat (7) to (13) for second drive]
15) Configure software RAID
16) [Write partition changes to disk and format swap partitions]
17) Create MD device
18) RAID1

At this point, I get an error that says, "No RAID partitions available", because no unused "Linux RAID Autodetect" are available. Well, I did set up the partition as "physical RAID volumes," but no mention was made anywhere about "RAID Autodetect." Also, these disks are brand new and clean. I manually wiped the disks (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda, same for /dev/hdc) before starting this install, so the partitioner bug that looks for existing stuff on the partition is not being triggered here.

19) Select Continue
20) 2 active devices, 0 spares

At this point, the partitioner hangs up completely. Since I'm using the text installer, all I see on the screen is a bit of flicker of the cursor in the lower left. Also, the hard disk activity light is on, but there is no disk activity, so I don't know what the partitioner is doing to my brand new drives.

The partitioner for Dapper worked just fine. Until this bug is fixed, can the developers put the Dapper version of the partitioner into Edgy?

I think this bug should be marked "critical." I was planning to install Edgy Eft and use it as my main OS (tolerating some crashes and data loss), just so I could contribute to the bug database. But since I cannot even install the OS, I have to drop back to Dapper. The FIRST thing that needs to be debugged is the installer, and all other work should stop until the installer is perfect. That's my opinion anyhow.

[Alexandre Possebom (alexandrepossebom)]

I have same problem in my Acer 3004wlci in knot2 live when I choose manual partitioning its not responding, in knot2 alternate my hard drive is not find, in dmesg show my hard drive have 0 physical heads.

[Daniel Ellis (danellisuk)]

I also came accross this using Knot-3 on my Dell Latitude D600, partitions as so:-

Pri - NTFS - XP
Ext.
   NTFS - VIsta
   NTFS - Data
   Ext2 - Ubuntu dpper
   Swap

When the partition dialog appears, it displays the message "The resize operation is imposible", then when selecting "Manually edit partition table" the diallog hangs with the spinning wait cursor. (You can still cancel out though).

[stepasha (stevebinrobert)]

I've got the same problem with knot 3. I didn't have this problem in knot 2. I'm running a powernotebooks powerpro 3:11 (It is a Quanta based laptop (MW1)). I believe it's running an intel 915 chipset. I've got several partitions. 3 ext3 partitions and a swap partition. When I try to start the manual partition editor, the installer just hangs.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Timothy, your bug is just about as different from this one as it's possible to get. Please file a new bug on partman-md if you're still experiencing this in the Edgy beta release. (And no, we can't just drop in the Dapper partitioner, because other things have changed so that it won't work; there are no doubt other options.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. This is also bug 58500, and is fixed in the Edgy beta release.