10.10 Installer shows no progress after fformatting partition

[RootsLINUX]

I'm trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 on a brand new 500GB hard drive I just purchased and installed in my machine. I boot from the CD and instruct Ubuntu to install to this drive and tell it to "erase and use the entire disk" for this 500GB drive. After moving forward from that, I see it saying a message about creating an ext4 partition for root "/" and then shortly after the entire install dialogue goes away. All I am left with is the little circle cursors spinning round (mouse input still works) and the installation background. The HDD activity light was still on though. I gave it about 3 hours before I finally gave up and tried again.


When I tried again, I saw that it did create two partitions (root and swap) during the last attempt. The same thing happened, although now even mouse input isn't responding so my system is completely locked up. HDD activity remains active this time as well.


Running Ubuntu from the CD works fine. The only problem I saw with it was when I ran gparted from the CD and tried to manually create a ext3 partition on my new disk drive. When I tried that, I ran into a similar occurrence (couldn't run any programs, eventually system locked up) and had to reboot.

Any idea what could be going on here? I have a second hard disk but I have a lot of valuable data on that and don't want to mess around with it. It could be a hardware failure, but that seems unlikely to me as this is a brand new Seagate disk drive. I suppose I could try installing it on a spare partition on my other drive and see what happens, but other than that I'm out of ideas.


Has anyone run into a similar installation problem?

[RootsLINUX]

As I test I decided to boot into the Debian distribution I already have installed on my second hard drive and try to format the new disk with gparted to create a single ext4 partition that takes up the entire drive. It failed with the following details:

========================================
Create Primary Partition #1 (ext4, 465.76 GiB) on /dev/sdb 00:01:50 ( ERROR )

create empty partition 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS )

path: /dev/sdb1
start: 2048
end: 976773119
size: 976771072 (465.76 GiB)
set partition type on /dev/sdb1 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS )

new partition type: ext4
create new ext4 file system 00:01:50 ( ERROR )

mkfs.ext4 -j -O extent -L "" /dev/sdb1

Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
30531584 inodes, 122096384 blocks
6104819 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
3727 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000

Writing inode tables: done
mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
warning: Unable to get device geometry for /dev/sdb1
ext2fs_mkdir: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while creating root dir
libparted messages ( INFO )

Could not determine physical sector size for /dev/sdb.
Using the logical sector size (512).
Could not determine physical sector size for /dev/sdb.
Using the logical sector size (512).
Could not determine physical sector size for /dev/sdb.
Using the logical sector size (512).

========================================

If the installer is trying to use gparted to format the drive (and I assume it is), I'm guessing it would run into a similar problem and thus fail. My guess is the installer doesn't handle this error very well and so it never reports it or notes that anything is wrong. The error timing of 1:50 matches about what I see when I do the same from the Ubuntu installer (the symptoms I describe happen after roughly 2 minutes from when I begin the partitioning).

I'm going to install Ubuntu on to a test partition of my Debian drive now to see if that works successfully. If it does, then I guess the problem is with my hard disk itself and I'll have to get it replaced?

[RootsLINUX]

Ubuntu install on the second "known good" disk was successful. Ran a handy disk utility I found in the install and it immediately informed me that the disk I was trying to install to has critical errors and "disk failure is imminent".


So false alarm, it was a hardware problem.

[Hedgehog1]

Ubuntu install on the second "known good" disk was successful. Ran a handy disk utility I found in the install and it immediately informed me that the disk I was trying to install to has critical errors and "disk failure is imminent".


So false alarm, it was a hardware problem.

Well - you wanted a 2TB disk anyway, right?

Nothing makes your day like seeing this:




The Hedge