[Bug 1065281] Re: Installer crashed when trying to partition 4k/4k sector hard disks

[Kent Baxley]

Here's a recap of what I've done recently:

I tested Ubuntu 13.10, OpenSuSE 12.3, RHEL 6.4 and SLES 11 SP3.

Of those 4, the only two that booted successfully after installation are RHEL 6.4 and SLES 11. 
You do, however, have to point to the elilo.boot file by hand in the EFI boot menu to get SLES 11 to boot, but after that, it seems to work fine.  

We need to take into account that RHEL6.4 is using a heavily patched
legacy grub from what I understand and SLES is using elilo.

Ubuntu 13.10 and OpenSuSE 12.3 behaved very similarly in that the
installer worked fine but once any attempt was made to boot the OS, we
were not successful.

Trying to boot Ubuntu brings us to a boot failure screen on the server
and we are asked to press F1 to try again, F2 for system setup, etc.
We do have an 'ubuntu' entry in the EFI boot menu and if we press "F1"
while that entry is highlighted, it shows that we do have a path to
grubx64.efi...however, it isn't working for some reason.

In the case of OpenSuSE we are dropped to a grub prompt with grub
complaining that ",gpt4" could not be found (although it seems to exist
on the disk).

So it looks like the operating systems that are using a more modern
version of grub are having the most trouble with booting advanced format
disks.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1065281

Title:
  Installer crashed when trying to partition 4k/4k sector hard disks

Status in The Dell PowerEdge project:
  In Progress
Status in OEM Priority Project:
  Fix Committed
Status in OEM Priority Project precise series:
  In Progress
Status in OEM Priority Project quantal series:
  In Progress
Status in OEM Priority Project raring series:
  Fix Released
Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu quantal series:
  Triaged
Status in “dosfstools” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “efibootmgr” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “partman-base” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “partman-basicfilesystems” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “partman-efi” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “dosfstools” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “efibootmgr” source package in Precise:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-base” source package in Precise:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-basicfilesystems” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “partman-efi” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “dosfstools” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed
Status in “efibootmgr” source package in Quantal:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-base” source package in Quantal:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-basicfilesystems” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed
Status in “partman-efi” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  partman_server crashes on Ubuntu 12.10 server for amd64 when trying to
  partition an Advanced Format (4k / 4k sector) hard disk.

  Disks that utilize 4k sectors with 512 emulation work fine.  The
  installer has no problems with those.

  Steps to Reproduce:
  1) Begin the installation in EFI mode. 
  2) At the disk partitioning stage, select "Guided use Entire Disk" or "Manual"
  3) Review and accept the proposed partitioning scheme and write changes to disk. 

  Actual Results:
  The system will attempt to create a the EFIboot partition.  At this stage the installer appears to hang.   Pressing Ctrl+AltF4 reveals that parted_server has crashed with the following message:

  parted_server[13865]: segfault at 22fa000 ip 00007fa6eb74bee7 sp
  00007fffec3ab500 error 4 in libparted.so.0.0.1[7fa6eb735000+64000]

  Expected results:
  Installation should carry on without a crash.

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