Bug#767682: D-I: installer hangs on re-formatting ext4 partition (having grub in the partition boot record).
Package: debian-installer
Version: 7.7 Beta 2
Severity: important
Tags: d-i
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
Installing Debian Jessie amd64 using Debian-installer 7.7 Beta 2 amd64 netinst on a partition utilized before.
The partition have had grub installed in the partition boot record (not sure if going without partition boot record makes a difference).
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
Using expert install, selected anual partitioning.
No partition table, LVM, software raid etc. modifications were done. Only sda3 was configured as follows:
* formatted using ext4
* mount as root
After that I selected write changes to disk.
* What was the outcome of this action?
The formatting dialog hanged at 33%.
* What outcome did you expect instead?
To re-format /dev/sda3 creating a fresh ext4 filesystem.
After examining the situation and killing the mkfs.ext4 process on a second virtual terminal, the installer gave a red screen error and returned to the partitioning menu.
Invoking mkfs.ext4 manually on the sencond VT, it gave the yes-no question that follows (captured under the running Jessie install, so mke2fs version might be different). This might be the point where the installer hanged at.
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3
mke2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
/dev/sda3 contains a ext4 file system
last mounted on / on Sat Nov 1 20:18:44 2014
Proceed anyway? (y,n)
After formatting from the second VT, installer was able to continue without re-formatting the partition. An other solution was to zero out the forst few megabytes of sda3 using dd and /dev/zero to allow formatting by the installer.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.16-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Reply to: