insserv: Service mountdevsubfs has to be enabled to start service hwclock

I can't see anything relevant in util-linux, and there are similar errors for unrelated packages (procps, and udev).

There is one difference in the recent sysvinit which might be related:

 Package: sysvinit-utils
+Essential: yes

This was half a merge error, the original justification ("Drop Essential: yes from sysvinit-utils since we use Upstart.") is bogus, but this is currently the most plausible cause for this breakage.

This bug was fixed in the package sysvinit - 2.88dsf-59.1ubuntu2

---------------
sysvinit (2.88dsf-59.1ubuntu2) wily; urgency=medium

  * Drop sysvinit-utils' Essential: flag again, as we used to (merge error in
    2.88dsf-59.1ubuntu1). This (hopefully) unbreaks debootstrap again.
    (LP: #1456670)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 19 May 2015 17:08:01 +0200

So that was not it, debootstrap is still failing.

This bug was fixed in the package sysvinit - 2.88dsf-59.1ubuntu3

---------------
sysvinit (2.88dsf-59.1ubuntu3) wily; urgency=medium

  * Drop sysvinit-utils' versioned Depends: on util-linux again, it introduces a
    circular dependency sysvinit-utils → util-linux → initscripts →
    sysvinit-utils. Replace with versioned Breaks. (LP: #1456670)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Wed, 20 May 2015 07:16:56 +0200

I see the same error message when upgrading from 14.04 to 15.04. Is there a workaround?

This error interrupted my upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04.01

I hacked around it by manually editing /var/lib/dpkg/info/util-linux.postinst and removing all update-rc.d calls. All those were related to hwclock (I will probably reinstall hwclock at some time in the future to fix it up). As I understand, (new) update-rc.d is simply not suitable to be called at this moment of the upgrade.

Thank you Mekk, this got me out of a mess up an upgrade.

I also encountered this on a xenial machine where the upgrade somehow was broken, and 'apt install' would give the following errors:

Preconfiguring packages ...
Setting up util-linux (2.27.1-6ubuntu3.2) ...
insserv: Service mountdevsubfs has to be enabled to start service hwclock
insserv: exiting now!
update-rc.d: error: insserv rejected the script header
dpkg: error processing package util-linux (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 util-linux
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The solution for us was to run

'dpkg-reconfigure initscripts'

and

'apt install'

to configure the large amount of unconfigured remaining packages.

Not sure why it happened, but i am guessing something was upgraded and configured in the wrong order.

It works fine again after our solution.

Got this issue while upgrading 12.04 -> 14.04 -> 16.04 on step 14.04 -> 16.04.
Simply removed /var/lib/dpkg/info/util-linux.postinst with 'sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/util-linux.postinst' and run 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f'.

Got this issue in Xenial again on kernel upgrade (had problems with insserv, udev and mountdevsubfs).
'sudo dpkg-reconfigure initscripts' helped me.