Partition editor freezes on the install

guessing package name

I wouldn't be so sure it's GParted, as GParted itself outside the installer works well.

I'm getting similar freezes with a Dapper install on a newly built system.

After some poking around, what I've found is that i can generally run indefinately off the live CD, but once I run Gparted and it does it's initial device scan, the next time the system accesses the CD (usually when I Apply Gparted actions, but it could be anything that has to load from disk), it gets a media error (bad sector) on /hda and locks up. If I'm lucky, an open terminal or console will let me run dmesg (which is where I see the media error for hda), though often I can't even get that far and Alt-SysRq-t produces no output.

I've tried alternative boot options (acpi=off noapic nolapic) and a beta mb BIOS (v3.35) to no avail. I've run a 4 hour memtest and verified the CD media (all pass).

System:
MSI K8NGM2-FID (GeForce 6150 + nForce 430)
AMD64 X2 3800+
2GB OCZ PC3200 CAS-2 memory pair.
2 x 300GB 7200.9 Seagate Barracuda SATA2 drives.
NEC IDE DVD Burner ND-3550A

Here's what I could transcribe of the dmesg output:
----
[313.342049] hda: media error (bad sector): status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplte Error }
[313.342058] hda: media error (bad sector): error=0x34 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x03 }
[313.342066] end request: I/O error dev hda sector 161224
[313.342071] Buffer I/O error on device hda logical block 40306
----
This repeats twice on sequential sectors and then the system hangs.

I've successfully used cfdisk to write some partitions without the hang problem (and i'm now exploring mkfs to see if I can follow thru and get an install without using Gparted at all). The freeze appears to be set up by something that happens in the Gparted device scan conducted when launched.

Oh one last note, I'm installing off the amd64-desktop image.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Thanks in advance.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!.