Comment 3 for bug 878568

The issue is related to the fact that the drive is descried as "Raid Component" in the Disk Utility Image (see comment #2).

I was able to use disk utility to remove this by formatting the drive as empty ~ and was able to continue on with the installation. So I am now happy. However I am very displeased with the installation process. I believe that this drive being flagged as "Raid Component" is what caused the original 11.04 to 11.10 system upgrade to fail; and is also responsible for the USB/DVD installation process to break.

All of the documentation I found on-line says that I should have first seen a Ubiquity screen that displays some nice graphics offering the "Install Alongside / Erase Disk / Something Else" options. But this never happed. Instead Ubiquity went straight to the partition editor screen ~ but that screen was missing the nicely colored partition representation at the top of the screen. Also, none of the buttons worked ~ and the only option was to abandon the installation using quit.

The cause of the problem dates back to my initial installation of Jaunty/Karmic on this machine. At that time the default Windows installation was ditched, and Ubuntu was successfully installed using the pre-Ubiquity installer/partitioner. However, during all the subsequent Karmic -> Lucid -> Natty conversions the problem never surfaced.

Ubiquity should provide a more more elegant for detecting that the partitioner cannot proceed and should give a more useful approach to continuing the installation instead of just forcing the Quit.