Wubi install cannot create swap space (8.04 Beta) [Regression from alpha 6]

[Michael James]

The Wubi installer worked fine on Vista and booted to the ubuntu installer fine; however the installer fails when trying to set up the swap space. I will post the exact error in a few hours.

In the mean time, here is install log.

BTW, the Wubi installer worked fine on alpha 6

[Michael James (mbj1103)]

Okay, back with the details:

The error on the graphical part of the installer reads:
"The creation of swap space in partition #1 of /host/ubuntu/disks/swap.disk failed."

Under TTY1(ctrl alt F1) [I left out the time stamp things (like 101.123478)] said:
"cramfs: wrong magic
cramfs: wrong magic
intel_rng: FWH not detected"

My computer is a lenovo r60

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

Not sure if it is relevant, but a fragmented swap file might cause mkswap to fail. Could you check whether the c:\ubuntu\disks\swap.disk was fragmented?

[Michael James (mbj1103)]

I can't check now because I deleted it a while ago and tried again (getting it to work). I do remember having about 15gb free on my disk at the time, so I doubt it is fragmentation. Then again it may just be!

HTH

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I've committed a fix for the ubiquity crash (due to previous_partitioning_page not being initialised properly in the presence of automation), but haven't looked at the mkswap failure that triggered it yet.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

LaMont:

Mar 24 13:53:01 ubuntu partman: mkswap: unable to write signature page

Could you make mkswap do the following: (a) repeat write() as necessary in the presence of EINTR or short writes until everything is written or there is a non-EINTR failure; (b) in the event that that isn't the problem here, also arrange for it to report strerror(errno) so that we can see why it failed?

Thanks in advance.

[Michael James (mbj1103)]

How would I do those commands?

[LaMont Jones (lamont)]

See https://edge.launchpad.net/~lamont/+archive for my ppa which has a version of util-linux (2.13.1-3ubuntu1+git3.dc4c02e) for you to try, which should do the right thing in making swap space.

If you have any questions in how to do that, please let me know. I'd like to get a test in before uploading to the archive.

thanks

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

LaMont,

Tried your package and looks good here.

I booted into LiveCD session (VM), installed your package, and ran ubiquity --automatic (using wubi preseed). The swap file was formatted without any error and swapped on. Note that I cannot reproduce the error above (which is possibly due to non-contiguous swap) all I can assess is whether it works or not in my case. And it does work.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Michael: I was actually addressing another developer, rather than suggesting something for you to try. In your case, I suggest you wait for notification that there's a new image to test, at which point we *will* want to know whether it fixes things for you, since we've been unable to reproduce it. This image should be available a day or so after LaMont uploads source code with the suggestions I made.

[LaMont Jones (lamont)]

Fixed in 2.13.1-4ubuntu1, please accept it: (472248 drops the preinst entirely, which was just checking for dpkg support that has been there since before dirt.)

util-linux (2.13.1-4ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * New Debian version: remaining ubuntu changes:
    - use libvolume-id instead of libblkid
    - udev hooks

 -- LaMont Jones <email address hidden> Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:03:50 -0600

util-linux (2.13.1-4) unstable; urgency=low

  * meta: Drop bashism in preinst. Closes: #472248
  * mkswap: when writing the signature page, handle EINTR returns. LP: #206113

 -- LaMont Jones <email address hidden> Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:01:29 -0600

[LaMont Jones (lamont)]

-4ubuntu1 had incorrect logic, which was caught and fixed as the patch was accepted upstream.

-5ubuntu1 has the corrected logic cherry-picked from upstream.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Fixed in util-linux 2.13.1-5ubuntu1:

util-linux (2.13.1-5ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * New Debian version: remaining ubuntu changes:
    - use libvolume-id instead of libblkid
    - udev hooks

 -- LaMont Jones <email address hidden> Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:03:50 -0600

util-linux (2.13.1-5) unstable; urgency=low

  * Switch to upstream's more-correct fix for LP#206113
  * mkswap: when writing the signature page, handle EINTR returns. LP: #206113

 -- LaMont Jones <email address hidden> Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:18:30 -0600

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

Reopening since a couple of users had problems creating the swap file in 8.04 final: http://ubuntuforums.org/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=4784674

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766320
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=765572

[hilad (citigica)]

hey i seem to be haveing a similar problem i think! Here are my logs

[hilad (citigica)]

i tried to do what LaMont Jones posted about installing the util-linux package but it said that the package is already installed. I'm afraid that I'm new to linux and that I've not even close to understanding everything that has been posted here. I need some help!

[Arthur Schlomoff (arthur-sdp)]

I had the same problem. Thanks to Agostino Russo advice, I solved it on my pc by cleanning a bit my HDD and running jkdefrag.

[Agostino Russo (ago)]

There are remaining issues with fragmented swap files. I have opened a new bug report #222546

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

This was a Wubi problem and it's already fixed.