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ub-pir
August 28th, 2010, 07:43 PM
I have a machine (Asus P4PE + 120GB SATA HDD) which has been running Karmic very successfully for a long time. I recently made the decision to upgrade to Lucid via the Update Manager. The upgrade seemed to go OK - no obvious errors - but the resulting version of Lucid had some weird problems: desktop messed-up, printers wouldn’t work any more, etc. So I concluded I had been unlucky - the upgrade had gone wrong – and I tried to install Lucid afresh from a CD.

Every time I try this, the install gets to the page to specify partitions – but this page is blank. No partitions are visible. The buttons to create a partition, etc. are all greyed-out. I have tried various boot options like removing “quiet splash—“, setting noapic/nolapic, etc. but nothing seems to work. I can happily run Lucid from the CD, no problem. I have also checked I have not got RAID accidentally installed, as mentioned elsewhere on this forum.

I am able to reinstall Karmic so I know there’s a filesystem there but the Lucid installer cannot see it. Any suggestions on how to proceed very welcome!

At the moment my only option seems to be to regress to Karmic.

srs5694
August 29th, 2010, 02:23 AM
See my Web page on this issue. (http://nessus.rodsbooks.com/missing-parts/index.html) The cause of your problem might or might not be the same, but it's worth checking.

Sef
August 29th, 2010, 05:42 AM
1) What does the command
sudo fdisk -l give you? (Copy and paste the results here.)

2) Can you get GParted and take a screenshot?

ub-pir
August 29th, 2010, 01:35 PM
See my Web page on this issue. (http://nessus.rodsbooks.com/missing-parts/index.html) The cause of your problem might or might not be the same, but it's worth checking.

This link is broken!

In frustration, I have now installed Debian Lenny - absolutely no problems. Lenny sees the HDD fine.

Thinking about it, I have anecdotal evidence that Lucid does not like older hardware. My motherboard is 5-6 years old (?) and the Lucid install fails. I have tried updating a very old laptop to Lucid and that failed. (Had to clean install Karmic.) I have a work colleague who tried to install Lucid on an older PC with no success. But on the positive side, I have successfully updated Lucid on my pretty new desktop at work and clean installed on the very new laptops of my two kids. I think I read that Canonical spent a lot of time making sure Lucid booted quickly - I wonder if support for older hardware has slipped as a side-effect of that optimization? Just a thought... Regardless, I now have a working system, albeit Debian!

Edit: Have now gone back to Karmic! Lenny is not a patch in terms of usability. But I ain't gonna mess with Lucid until I update the hardware!