Installing to arbitrary block devices

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 03:10:42PM +0100, Jody Belka wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 02:37:58PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 06:20:37PM +0100, Jody Belka wrote:
> > > When I was installing ubuntu onto a new system last night, using the server
> > > expert installer, I found my life made much more difficult than it needed
> > > to be by the fact that Ubuntu does not seem to want to let me install to
> > > arbitary block devices. Instead, it wants to have full control over where
> > > I am installing to.
> > 
> > What particular block devices are you talking about here? If this is
> > really just a bug under the hood, it may be fixable.
> 
> In this particular case, it's evms managed volumes. Which are more difficult
> anyway now to deal with during the installer, as the evms programs have been
> removed, so I need to scp them off of another machine. Can cope with that
> though.

OK. I don't think we ever properly supported evms in the installer,
although it's true that there used to be an evms-udeb.

> > > With Debian it used to be possible (haven't looked in a while) to manually
> > > mount volumes to the /target tree, and then continue with the install.
> > > Unfortunately, even this isn't possible with Ubuntu.
> > 
> > I think that's a feature that was lost in Debian too upon moving from
> > boot-floppies to debian-installer. You can actually do it, I believe -
> > you just have to make sure that udpkg thinks partman-base is configured,
> > and remember to set up /target/etc/fstab by hand.
> 
> Ah, what do I do to make it think that?

Edit /var/lib/dpkg/status, find the stanza for partman-base, change
"unpacked" to "installed"; and then go back from partman and select the
next step in the main menu. Totally untested, mind you, and try it on a
scratch machine first. :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]