[plug] ubuntu install on netbook fails to create file system

[Onno Benschop]

I'll preface my response with: "I'm guessing..."

Your upgrade/installation of 11.10 should be completely independent of the
/home partition, which is precisely why people opt to make it a separate
partition in the first place. Worst case scenario is that you do an
installation without mounting the /home partition, boot into single-user
mode, empty the newly created /home directory and update your fstab to
mount /home as expected.

I am unsure why you're restructuring the partition table, in my experience
this is a pretty good way to loose all your data unless you know precisely
what you're doing and why. I'd be silly to assume that you have a full
backup of your /home partition, but who knows, perhaps I'm lucky today - if
you do have such a backup - good for you! Install or upgrade to 11.10, then
create a /home partition, then restore from backup.

As I said, I'm guessing. You might have additional information that changes
my comments slightly, or completely; I cannot tell from my side of the
keyboard.

Good Luck, sounds like you might need it :|

O

On 4 January 2012 15:22, Gavin Chester <gavin.chester at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, I've got hold of an older acer aspire netbook with 160gb harddrive and
> winxp. I successfully shrunk the xp partition, preserving the rescue
> partition, and installed ubuntu 10.10 netbook release. I had to use a
> bootable thumbdrive for this, of course. Everything worked just peachy.
>
> In the process of that first install, I elected to encrypt the /home on an
> extended partition. I fear this may be the root of the problem.
>
> Now I'm trying to repeat the process by upgrading with ubuntu 11.10 and it
> balks at the stage of writing the file structure, saying that it is unable
> to create the ext4fs on the root partition. I have tried restructuring the
> partition table differently, and even tried ext3fs, but always borks at the
> same point. And, now that the partition table has been altered (without a
> filesystem written) grub complains that it can't find a file system.
>
> btw: the installation media is fine - I've used it for an install on
> another netbook the same day.
>
> Any clue whether the original encrypted partition is the cause of the
> problem, and if so how to overcome it?
>
> Gavin
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-- 
Onno Benschop

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