[Bug 1582899] Re: in-target: mkinitramfs: failed to determine device for /

[Casey Stone]

nicely researched and documented bug. Why not fixed three years later? I
hit this (or seeminly this same bug) doing an install of server 18.04.2
yesterday. I needed to enable ssh for remote install and lowered debconf
priority. This gave me some good clues I'll now try some work-arounds.

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Title:
  in-target: mkinitramfs: failed to determine device for /

Status in base-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in initramfs-tools package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in live-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Sysadmin reported in #ubuntu (later #ubuntu-kernel) the 16.04 ubuntu-
  server ISO installer failed due to being unable to configure linux-
  image-4.4.0-21-generic.

  Lots of diagnostics and one SSH remote session later we seem to have
  narrowed it down to the installer.

  At the installer's boot menu the F6 option "Expert mode" is chosen.

  During initial ram file-system creation (after the kernel image is installed) the /dev/ file-system is not mounted in /target/ and therefore
  the initramfs-tools/hook-functions::dep_add_modules_mount() cannot match
  the mount device of "/" (in this case /dev/sda3) with any node under /dev/ which only contains static entries.

  Cause appears to be that live-installer.postinst has the crucial step
  calling library.sh:setup_dev() commented out:

  #waypoint 1 setup_dev

  OS=linux
  setup_dev() calls setup_dev_${OS}
  setup_dev_linux() mounts procfs and devtmpfs into /target/

  ----

  Originally the cause of the error message appeared to be that the
  symlink names in /dev/disk/by-uuid/  haven't been updated after the
  partitioning stage if there were pre-existing partitions and file-
  systems on the install device, *and* the sysadmin chose to format the
  existing partitions when selecting mountpoints.

  In this case a hardware RAID device presents:

  /dev/sda1 (/boot/)
  /dev/sda2 (swap)
  /dev/sda3 (/)

  From the shell I noticed:

  root at tmpstorage:/# ll /dev/disk/by-uuid/
  total 0
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May 17 19:39 130e4419-4bfd-46d2-87f9-62e5379bf591 -> ../../sda1
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May 17 19:39 127d3fa1-c07c-48e4-9e26-1b926d37625c -> ../../sda3
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May 17 19:39 78b88456-2b0b-4265-9ed2-5db61522d887 -> ../../sda2
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   9 May 17 19:39 2016-04-20-22-45-29-00 -> ../../sr1
  drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 May 17 19:39 ..
  drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 May 17 19:39 .

  root at tmpstorage:/# blkid /dev/sda*
  /dev/sda: PTUUID="a84e60fd" PTTYPE="dos"
  /dev/sda1: UUID="61365714-8ff7-47a2-8035-8aed9e3191a6" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-01"
  /dev/sda2: UUID="78b88456-2b0b-4265-9ed2-5db61522d887" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-02"
  /dev/sda3: UUID="75f68451-9472-47c7-9efc-ed032bfa9987" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-03"

  More details to follow.

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