[LUNI] Re: Installing Debian on brand new dell dimension 9200

[Martin Maney]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 01:41:14PM -0500, Fred Yankowski wrote:
> it seemed to hang.  I walked away and left it and sometime within a
> half hour or so it managed to proceed.  The long delay happened at a
> time when the installer could have been looking to see how the disks
> are partitioned.  I wasn't installing LVM or RAID at the outset but I
> have some existing LVM LVs on the disks involved.  I suspect that the
> installer was particularly confused by a removable MO disk unit that
> I've got on my SCSI chain.

No, it's a known problem in the Feisty installer (possibly there's been
an updated version released - omens I found were unclear).  Briefly,
the problem is that udev isn't configured to recognize LVMs on boot in
the installer, because that would cause them to be activated too soon
for the partitioner's work flow.  But that leads to the automatic
creation of the LV's device nodes not happening as expected, and
there's a timeout of three minutes for each one before the LVM setup
process gives up on automagic and slaps them in by hand.  Just found
this out yesterday installing Feisty on a box that had ten LVs.  I
recorded 31 minutes of boredom before things proceeded.  :-(

Oh yes, the delay reportedly also happens at some point if you setup
new LVs during partitioning.  Haven't had occasion to see that myself. 
And of course it works normally when you're not booting from the CD,
but that does make the CD's rescue option kind of unusuable...

You can find info about this, but it took a bit of poking around by way
of Google.  In retrospect, I wonder if it would have been quicker to
start by looking for errata by way of Ubuntu's documentation and/or
wiki...

-- 
...and of course you must be careful not to overwrite the bounds of
memory blocks, free a memory block twice, forget to free a memory block,
use a memory block after it's been freed, use memory that you haven't
explicitly allocated, etc.  We C++ programmers have developed tricks
to help us deal with this sort of thing, in much the same way that people
who suffer severe childhood trauma develop psychological mechanisms to
insulate themselves from those experiences.  -- Joseph A. Knapka