[Solved] Katastrophic Koala =P

[Arkad]

8.10 worked fine; 9.04 works great; 9.10... hum, will work ?

Hi everybody, I have just tried the Koala with the AMD64 live CD. First issue: no hard drive/partition available in Dolphin. With both 8.10 and 9.04 live CDs, I had/have immediate access to my internal SATA drives. When I check with fdisk, it detects them all right:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xad93ad93

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1  *      1    6527  52428096  7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2      6528    30401  191767905  5 Extended
/dev/sda5      6528    30401  191767873+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe0e45a98

  Device Boot   Start     End   Blocks  Id System
/dev/sdb1        1    1958  15727603+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2      1959    30401  228468397+  5 Extended
/dev/sdb5      1959    2480   4192933+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb6      2481    6527  32507496  83 Linux
/dev/sdb7      6528    30401  191767873+ 83 Linux

So I tried a mount with no success. First it says /dev/sdXX is neither in /etc/fstab nor in /etc/mtab. I'm used to edit fstab on my current configuration so I tried that just in case. But it just changes the mount error message to something like: super device does not exist.

Since the rest seemed to work, Internet, sound and various software; I launched the installation process anyway. But when it arrived to the disks configuration screen, the only thing it displayed was exactly (I have noted it ):

Serial ATA RAID isw_dgagjfcigc_BootRAID1()-250.1 GB Linux device-mapper

I have no RAID and I don't ask for it, it is deactivated in the BIOS. I used RAID1 when I was on WinXP (so much time seems to have pass...) but I don't need it anymore. I have read on another thread to try other options in the BIOS, in my case there are 3 options: Deactivated, AHCI (I think) and RAID. Tried the 3 options with no change in the Karmic installation process.

The only thing I can do is click New partition which warns me it will delete the data on the whole disk. But I just want to install Karmic on /dev/sdb1 where my current Jaunty is.

I have not a clue about what to try next, any ideas ? I don't mind to mess with my current Jaunty partition since I have done a backup of my partition with tar. The backup file is saved elsewhere, there is a backup of the backup and I have already used it so I know it works well. 8)


Also on another subject, I've noticed a slight improvement with the display configuration in Karmic: the menu shows the Multiple Monitors tab and it detects my 2 monitors. Unfortunately... :-X it refuses to set up an extended desktop. The option is there and I can select it but it just doesn't work. When I click on Identify Outputs, it displays on each screen:

DVI-0
DVI-1

So I suppose it will only work with the proprietary ATI drivers. (Not tested yet). My graphic card is an ATI HD4850.

Thanks for reading!

PS: added my full configuration in my signature.

[Guest]

Re: Katastrophic Koala =P

Same problem here. Got 4 sata hard drives. Kubuntu tells me, the first 2 harddrives (250gb) are a raid (500gb), the 3rd harddrive (250gb) is empty and the 4th harddrive (1tb) is full... i dont have a raid... what a mess!

[Arkad]

Re: Katastrophic Koala =P

Hi, a solution has been found. You need to launch the live CD, open the terminal and execute

sudo apt-get remove dmraid

then run the installation process.

I have tried it and now my drives and partitions are recognised.

Unfortunately for me, when I ask the installer to format and use my current jaunty ext4 partition, I have at the end an error saying it cannot do it... >

However I have read the dmraid removal worked for many people, so maybe you'll be a lucky one.

[Guest]

Re: Katastrophic Koala =P

Thank you Arkad.

Your info worked great for me...

[Guest]

Re: Katastrophic Koala =P

Good to know that package fixes the issue. I'm old-fashioned so still use IDE drivers exactly because of problems like the above.

I had a different problem that actually should be a bug though I don't know where to submit it. I installed to a non-primary partition and had install try to place the boot loader there. This caused the install app to totally crash at least once and then produce a dead install the next few times... [yay, installed like 8 times total till it worked...]. Finally, I put grub on another drive's mbr and that did the trick. Before that, neither BCD nor BTX (BSD's boot loader) could boot the resulting install.

Bug/suggestion: do not allow the end user to install the boot loader in a place where it obviously won't work or at least display a warning if it's attempted. It will save people a good few hours of sweating and cursing.

...there were some other bugs too but that was the major reason it took forever to get the latest kubuntu running here..

Anyway, now it runs great once the devious install app is done.

[Arkad]

Re: Katastrophic Koala =P

Success!

So the dmraid tip alone was not enough for me because the installer was unable to perform any task on my drive. I have downloaded the alternate ubuntu cd, which allows you to not use raid, then the whole installation process went flawlessly. I have installed the new grub on the mbr but, of course, when it rebooted, I've got an error:

Gave up waiting for root device.
Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxx does not exist. Dropping to a shell.
(initramfs)

The given UUID was perfectly good, so I quickly found it was still a raid related problem by doing a ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid, which gave me only one UUID for an imaginary raid device. I rebooted and edited the grub entry to add a nodmraid option, then I was, finally, in KARMIC KOALA!

Don't forget to edit the grub file with the nodmraid option so it will be permanent. I also immediately added my old entries in the new grub thanks to this nice tutorial: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

So now I have Jaunty and Karmic on the same drive, happily sharing a common swap area. 8)

(See you all when I'll struggle to configure my ATI card and my dual monitor)