Bug#582044: hw-detect: same issue with squeeze xen domU running XenServer

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Alex Zeffertt]
> Hi,
>
> I've seen this same problem in a squeeze domU running on XenServer.
> The "Detecting disks and all other hardware" screen takes about 15
> minutes to complete.  Then the "[!] Detect disks" screen appears and
> prompts the user to select a driver.

This sound very much like the udev version skew reported in #586404.
This causes every call to 'udevadm settle' to take 3 minutes.
Solution unknown, but a workaround is to kill and start udevd using
the shell in tty2.

> I initially chose "xen-blkfront" but this had no effect apart from to
> return me to the same screen.  However, when I selected "continue with
> no disk drive" the installation completed successfully and squeeze was
> installed to /dev/xvda (the paravirtualized block device).
>
> It seems like hw-detect does not recognise /dev/xvd* as a valid block
> device to which Debian can be installed, but the rest of
> debian-installer has no problem with it!

Perhaps this is related to the udev version skew too?

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen