[Bug 924660] Re: 12.04 Installer stuck on 'Removing conflicting operating system files'

[Philip Guyton]

I installed with a different username than already existed on the original home partition.
But mounted the original home as home2 as suggested by Stephen Rees-Carter above.  Then guided by Stephen's advice, prior to rebooting after the install had finnished I did the following.

A home dir was created by the install in /target/ with the new user's dir in it, ie /target/home/hettie.
This contains the new skeleton users home.
I moved this /target/home/hettie to /target/home2 using:-
sudo mv /target/home/hettie /target/home2/
N.B. the user created during the install was "hettie"
This does leave a /home on what will be the / but that will be mounted over with the existing real home partition.
If you feel confident enought that you are not removing something then also do:-
<bad if you don't know for sure> sudo rm -rf /target/home

I then did the edit suggested by Stephen Rees-Carter above with the
following sed command.

sudo sed -i 's/home2/home/' /target/etc/fstab
sync
then rebooted using the dialog indicating that the install had finnished that we have been ignoring this whole time.

This way I get a clean new user and preserve the data of the existing user, and have the existing home partition for both.
Also note that if the original user was the only and first created users from a previous Ubuntu install then you will have all rights to the existing users home directory via /home/originalusername

N.B this is not to be advised unless you know what you are doing or you
are prepared to loose all of your existing /home if you make a mistake.

I know this isn't any help with the bug but it might help some get going on the beta so they can help elsewhere.
P.S. one can always re-create the original user in the new system and then (where username=original user name):-
sudo chown -R username.username /home/username
from a Ctrl+Alt+F1 session then return gui login via Ctrl+Alt+F7
Hope this helps someone.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/924660

Title:
  12.04 Installer stuck on 'Removing conflicting operating system files'

Status in “ubiquity” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  When installing 12.04 on a hard drive with two partitions (/ & /home)
  formatting only the / partition results in the installer hanging on
  "Removing conflicting operating system files" after it has wiped away
  the / partition. This leaves an unusable system.

  When I install Ubuntu, I format the /(root) partition, but leave the
  /home unformatted and mount it. This means I can keep all my files and
  preferences while having a clean Ubuntu install.

  My home directory is encrypted, so my theory is that the installer is
  unable to get into my home dir and hangs. Since this step happens
  before the login details are provided.

  This is a pretty serious regression IMHO, since it breaks the current
  install and prevents the new install from completing.

  
  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
  Package: ubiquity 2.9.15
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-12.20-generic 3.2.2
  Uname: Linux 3.2.0-12-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 1.91-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperVersion: 1.302
  Date: Wed Feb  1 04:31:12 2012
  LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Alpha amd64 (20120131.3)
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: ubiquity
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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