I have been struggling with Ubuntu 9.10 for some months now with an unpredictable (but very regular) hang. Despite many posts on this forum and elsewhere, no effective hints as to what the problem may have been were found.

So it was decided to do a fresh install - but as 10.04 was in the wind, it was further decided to wait for its release and do the new install then.

After eventually updating 9.1 to the "Your system is up-to-date" status, an upgrade was attempted using the alternative CD downloaded from the Ubuntu site (check-sum is good).

Immediately following the keyboard selection page, the following dialogue was presented:

"Ubi-partman crashed.

Ubi-partman failed with exit code 10. Further information may be found in /var/log/syslog. Do you want to try running this step again before continuint? If you do not, your installation may fail entirely or may be broken."

Naturally enouogh, installation was discontinued after that advice.

Then it was decided to attempt an on-line upgrade.

After running for about 3 hours and seemingly going well, the system once again hung. Now of course, there is no Ubuntu installation whatsoever.

The "smart thing" to do then was to attempt a clean re-install of 9.10. But alas! The same "ubi-partman" message.

Re-reading the release notes for 10.04 revealed the non-interactive boot interface.

So installation was again attempted using the now known interactive "advanced" boot options.

Guess what? Same "ubi-partman" message.

Thank God for Windows or I would really be in deep trouble.

I am using an ASUS P5VD2-X motherboard with standard BIOS and Intel Core Duo processor. Windows XP is installed on an IDE HDD while Ubuntu was installed on a separate SATA HDD (which is where I want it in future as well).

Is there a solution to this or am I doomed to revert to Windows?