Partition Tool in Base Installer Refuses to work around a Partition Problem
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| partman-base (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I recently upgraded from Edgy to Feisty on my Dell Inspiron Laptop. After a few reboots I encountered a filesysten problem where I was dropped to a prompt because e2fsck could not repair the filesystem problem. Running the fsck.ext3 utility manually didn't work, nor could I boot up the Ubuntu Feisty Install/Live CD and properly perform the repair.
After numerous attempts to repair the damaged filesystem I finally decided to backup any files in the /home partition to a remote usb drive. I then wanted to reinstall Ubuntu Feisty. Since I liked my former partitioning arrangement I decided to keep what I had before and simply reformat each and reinstall over the top.
When I got to the disk partitioner portion of the installation I tried to select the partition that had previously demonstrated problems. Each time it would start trying to write the partition information to disk and never return control to me.
I then thought that something must be really screwed up with the disk and thought I would just have the partitioner do an automatic format of the hard drive. The partitioner did remove all the other partitions and created only an ext3 and swap partition. Again when it came time to format the partition I ran into problems. It refused to reformat. Now the laptop is no longer usable.
After a couple of days I had a thought that perhaps all I needed was to wipe the disk clean and reformat with something like Knoppix. Once this reformatting was complete I would then go and re-install Feisty per my initial layout.
Knoppix was able to get past the problem without an issues at all. I was allowed to reformat the disk any way I chose. After using Knoppix I was able to return to the Feisty installer and everything turned out fine.
For the record I used Knoppix 5.1 CD which uses a mke2fs version 1.40-wip with a build date of 14-11-2006. Checking the version of the Feisty mke2fs I found that it to used version 1.40-WIP with EXT2FS library with a build date of 14-11-2006.
The problem I encountered with the filesystem error is really bad, but having an installer that can't work around the problem is worse.
| C. Scott Mark (csmark) wrote | #1 |
| Sam Williams (sam-williams) wrote | #2 |
| Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote | #3 |
| Changed in base-installer: | |
| status: | Unconfirmed → Needs Info |
| Sam Williams (sam-williams) wrote | #4 |
| jal (bp-ns) wrote | #5 |
| Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote | #6 |
| Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote | #7 |
I don't know how applicable this would be, but that sounds like it might be bad sectors in just the right spot to screw things up. As for the the lockup, how long were you waiting? Sometimes the wait can be amazingly long. How many partitions were you using, their name, and type?
Did you try changing the order of the partitions on the drive?
I'll see if I can recreate the problem with a little editing here and there to see if it's hardware or software problem.
C. Scott Mark