For what its worth, Lucid Lynx didn’t generate positive initial buzz, and for the first time since Ubuntu 5.04, I didn’t download and install latest version of Ubuntu. I had read comments that there are problems with latest version (that too LTS – Long Term support) of Ubuntu, so I decided to hold back.

Then couple days ago, I got hold of an ISO someone had downloaded, and installed successfully. (They came to me asking about why ssh wouldn’t work for them – As you might already know, Desktop edition doesn’t ship ssh server by default. It was matter of minutes to download ssh via apt-get, and they were up and running – and now to your regularly scheduled program) So I decided to give it a shot. Soon I realized, my decision to hold off was correct.

Attempt to boot from LiveCD

First of all, it took really long time for LiveCD to boot. I mean it did show the GUI splash screen quite quickly, but then for a really long time, it kept showing Ubuntu, and a progress bar (as dots/circles) None of the terminals were accessible via Alt+Fn.

Unable to recognize the existing Partitions

When it did boot, it was unable to recognize the partition table. Further troubleshooting showed that “Disk Utility” program under System->Administrator was able to read the partition table correctly, and identified the partitions correctly, but GParted (and embedded Partition Manager for the installer) could not. They showed entire disk as available. But a picture is worth a thousand words. See this image (I’ve not captured this, several others are facing the same problem) .

To be fair, this issue is well documented in Release notes here. But it still doesn’t change the fact that there was no way to preserve existing partitions and install Lucid on existing empty partition.

Some link of the internet asked to uninstall “dmraid” package, but it didn’t help. I didn’t have RAID anyway.
Next, back to the person who had successfully installed it from the same ISO. Turns out he installed it via Wubi. So I decided to try that.

Wubi woes

Now I ran into “permission denied” issue. After copying the files in target folder from CD, it would exit. Unhiding AppData folder didn’t help. Finally I downloaded wubi.exe, and copied an ISO and Wubi.exe in same newly created empty folder. This seemed to have worked – but make sure that if you want Wubi to use local ISO – Disable the internet or better still, remove the ethernet cable (as I did) else Wubi will go out and try to download the entire image before it starts installing.

This time it went much further – installed Ubntu successfully (or so I thought) and provided me a choice to reboot now, or later. After I reboot, I selected Ubuntu from Windows Boot loader list. It “continued” the installation, but at he stage where it gets time from network time server, it was stuck in a loop “No root partition defined” there were no option other than OK. Interestingly, the installation progress bar showed 272% (Yes more than 100%)

Finally … Success (sort of)

Luckily I didn’t have a precious data, and machine was my secondary machine, so I could afford to repartition the entire disk. That is what I did. I already had brand new ISO, This time I booted from USB drive, so that I didn’t have to worry about bad CD. I selected to repartition the disk from the Lucid Installer. Rest of the install went very smooth.

Conclusion

It is really sad that all three issues (permission denied, unable to recognize partition table, and no root partition defined) are widely reported. Only the first one (permission denied) has a work around that worked.

Image courtesy : jeffpro57