Ubuntu 12.10 dual boot installation hangs by opening disk partitioner

[tonycabo]

Greetings to the whole Ubuntu Forums community.

First of all,

Thank you.

;D

I'm an absolute beginner as an active user of the amazing tools that the open source movement has been creating. The spirit and motivations that sustain the will of all the people involved in these initiatives is one of those things that reinforces one's faith in humanity. :O

So, I've got a low spec machine that I need to prepare for creative purposes. Details:

• Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop
• Intel Celeron M CPU 420 @ 1.60 GHz
• 504 Mb RAM
• 90 Gb hard drive with 40 Gb of free space
• Windows XP installed

The target is to achieve the best performance possible with audio software like Pure Data or Ardour, powerful document creating tools like LaTeX based text applications or Lilypond, and other programs like GIMP. I'm well-informed about the poor specs of my machine for some of these applications, but there's not money to get better hardware and my only choice is to adapt. However, I dream with expanding my RAM to 2 Gb some day in the future.

I chose the Lubuntu 12.10 distribution, downloaded the Wibu installer and tested it. After applying solutions to small common issues (drivers, Broadcom wireless...) that I could fix with the resources of this forum and other sites, everything was working smooth and perfectly. I also tested the applications I'm planning to use frequently and they did very well. So I wanted to go further and make a dual boot installation alongside Windows XP, having uninstalled Wubi first. I first tried the Lubuntu Installer, which was just too big for my RAM and hanged at the beginning of the installation. Despite of that, I can run Lubuntu from the Live CD without problems.

After that, I tried the Lubuntu Alternate Installer unsuccessfully and also tried it through Ubuntu Minimal Installer having exactly the same problem: Right after getting the message "Starting up partitioner" nothing happens. The screen remains empty, showing just the background colour and a white bar at the bottom. At this point, if I hit the Enter key additional white bars appear. When hitting Esc the ]^ symbols are written in the blank lines of the screen. I also can type regular text in the blank lines. I always exit from this stuck point with Ctrl+Alt+Del.

All the .iso installers were mounted in CD-R disks and tested before burning the CD with MD5sum, and after with the checker that comes in the CD. I didn't have any errors at both of the processes.

Since the thing seems to be related with disk partitions I booted Windows XP and made disc scan with CHKDSK, defragmented the drive with Diskeeper and ran CClean. I also made a backup of the important files. After, I downloaded GParted and mounted it on a CD and booted to start the application from the Live CD. Following tutorials, I resized Windows XP's partition to 43 Gb, Created an ext4 partition for Lubuntu's root folder (40 Gb) and also created a swap-linux partition (4 Gb). I booted Windows XP twice, making another CHKDSK. Windows XP seems to have adapted perfectly to it's reduced hard drive space. After the whole thing I retried the three installation CDs mentioned above and got stuck exactly at the same point.

Finally, after searching in this forum and other sites for solutions to this thing without success I created this thread looking for hope. I really tried to do my best after posting, but i really can't get over the thing and it is quite frustrating. Sorry for relating the whole Installing Lubuntu chapter of my life in such a long post. I just thought it could be useful explaining the process of what I tried. D:

So, please, beloved experts: What's going on here? ;D

[tonycabo]

bump

[NikTh]

Hi ,

It seems here that you tried almost everything and is difficult to someone to advise you.

However I will give my suggestions .

First.

Try with a Live-USB instead of CD . You can create a LiveUSB with Unetbootin program : http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ , then boot from the Live-USB and try again.

Second

You said you tried with alternate CD , so the suggestion for a nomodeset option , might be not useful , but take a look here : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132

Third
Also you can try with another version eg: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/re...12.04/release/ as the 12.10 is pretty new and maybe a bug exists in the installation CD.
If the installation of 12.04 goes well , you can try to upgrade to the newer version 12.10 with update manager.

Thanks

[oldfred]

I have to agree with NikTh, that is seems like you have done everything correctly.

The one time I had issues with gparted not opening my sda drive, chkdsk resolved that issue.

You seem to have verified ISO & CDs which is often an issue as sometimes downloads may not be good. And tying different ISOs sometime resolves that issue.

Does gparted show any issue with partitions? You can post screenshot of gparted.

[tonycabo]

Here you are. This is my report:

I spoke about the thing with a college mate and I told him NikTh's suggestions. The second one seemed to be the most promising due to his thoughts, and after reading P4man's first post in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132 I saw there things that seem to have solved situations like mine: using noapic, nolapic and acpi=off.

acpi=off
This disables ACPI completely.
Note: this may not work with all computers and will disable a lot of useful (or even needed) features. In some cases it may even disable some crucial features, like.. fans. Be careful with this option, it might cause your machine to overheat if the fans no longer turn. Think of this as a last resort. Also note some machines require acpi=ht instead.

Noapic and nolapic
noapic and nolapic kernel options instruct the kernel to not use certain programmable interrupt controllers. To understand what that means exactly requires a deep knowledge of PC hardware, I will not go in to that here, Ill limit myself to saying on some bioses, especially for older systems, there are problems in the implementation of this and it may be necessary to disable either or both to cure a wide range of obscure problems, often but not always related to keyboard and mouse and power management (standby/resume issues).

I tried all three options from the Lubuntu Installer, one by one and all together and I get stuck again at the same point. The percentage bar that appears under Starting up the partitioner actually reaches 100%, but after it always happens what I told above. Reading about ACPI, APIC and LAPIC I learnt it has something to do with standards within stuff that is set in part through the BIOS. I saw my BIOS software was out of date and downloaded the latest version from Lenovo support site and successfully installed it. Windows XP runs perfectly. I tried again the Lubuntu Alternate Installer after doing this, also messing with the apic, lapic and acpi=off options and didn't get anything new. D:

oldfred, here are the GParted screenshots (thanks to Bartender for his howto):

Instinct also made me take a picture of this:

It's maybe worth clearing that another thing I did after partitioning the disk and retrying installation without success was opening GParted again and formatting the ext4 and swap-linux partitions to it's respective file systems. They just lose the labels I set when creating them (Lubuntu_root and Lubuntu_swap), but it had no effect by trying again to install.

This seems to be something hard, but I won't give up. I'll try also the other options NikTh suggested. Thanks for your interest, NikTh and oldfred!

Just tell me if the new posted info leads to further conclusions. Let's see if we get this working! :O

[oldfred]

I still do not see any issue. Are you using gparted from Ubuntu liveCD or a gparted liveCD?

If you need the extra boot parameters you usually have to add them to boot Ubuntu liveCD. Some of the other liveCD like gparted may then work as they often are designed to work on older systems.

From LiveCD have you run memory tests? Sometimes Ubuntu/Linux shows memory issues that Windows just ignores (until something major happens).

Sometimes BIOS settings can make a difference. When you installed a new BIOS it reverted to defaults also.

[squakie]

A couple of quick questions:

- are you running anything like fakeraid?

- does it just sit there, or does it say "xx%" and "scanning disks"?

[oldfred]

Good question squakie

If drive was ever in a RAID configuration, that leaves meta-data on the drive. Ubuntu sees that and usually does not work.

[squakie]

I wish I could say it was an original thought, but I found mention of it on the net and I remember the same problem when I tried to set up raid a while back. Took a bit of monkeying around to get that off the drive so I could really use it. For the OP: being able to use gparted on the disk wouldn't show this problem. I remember I used gparted and it did it's thing, but I couldn't use the drive. I wish I could tell you what to check, how to check it, and fix it, but I don't have those answers. Perhaps someone like OldFred can point you in the right direction for those.

[oldfred]

If you ever turned RAID on in BIOS. But never run this if you have or want to keep RAID:

sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sda

There are many BIOS settings that can cuase issues. I have kept a few. Most will not apply but you can review list.

Some issues on booting install:
fixed the problem by adding rootdelay to grub.cfg this allows time for the usb drive to load.
Though my drive was appearing in the bios and working for install it was actually "disabled"!
BIOS settings need USB mouse & keyboard
BIOS in not updated to latest revision
BIOS not set to boot CD or USB first
BIOS shows floppy or firewire and you do not have those
changing newer BIOS SATA 6 Gbit/s from 6 Gbs to a SATA II - 3Gbs
BIOS & disable "Boot Sector Virus Protection"
Other BIOS settings - Security or locked down Boot sector, Bitlocker
Old BIOS, new drive 137GB max boot size or very large / partition over 100GB
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootPartition
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Cr...onAfterInstall
NTFS partition needs chkdsk, gparted will not see drive if chkdsk flag set, flag is set on resize
Raid meta data on drive - even if one drive (Vendor happend to set it on)
Old gpt data on drive
Disable Quickboot in BIOS
turning off UDMA in the BIOS my problem has gone away.(old system & may make system slower)
BIOS setting, Keyboard response in grub really slow
Fast Boot setting prevents keyboard from working & other issues
Bios not loading no key works - disconnected power for about 10-15 minutes and the bios reset itself.
After update, It had reset to the BIOS defaults, setting the video to ONBOARD and switching off the dynamic video memory allocation (manually allocating 32Mb instead of leaving it as AUTO).
The mode for the disc was set to AUTO. Changed it to LBA. Then it worked.
Sometimes specific issues by motherboard like this:
[Natty] Marvell 88SE9120 IDE-Part not working
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/777325
External drive needed separate power supply
Asus m4a87td core unlocker feature on usb3 was causing the problem
Asus - Security> I / O interface Security> "New interface card" or so. SET IT TO LOCKED!!!
In the Asus BIOS I selected Advanced Mode>Advanced>SATA Configuration.
Changed IDE Mode to AHCI Mode
Then,when the SATA3G_1 selection appears in the drive list below,select the Enabled option.
set pci=nomsi or other boot paramter
So to people with an Asrock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard: if you install Ubuntu, make sure the drives you are installing from and to are not connected to the Asmedia SATA ports!
lib64 folder missing??
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2069764