[Bug 1241867] Re: installing with LVM over old install with LVM results in unable to install bootloader

[Matt Hanyok]

Hello! A year later it turns out this is STILL happening. I had a drive
with a 14.04 LTS install on it which had been set up with LVM.

I booted an install USB to do a clean install of 14.04 (had moved the
drive to a different system) and told ubiquity: "erase disk and install
ubuntu" and "use LVM with this install".

It DOES NOT erase the disk when you do this. It seems the installer is
mounting the drive's swap partition, I guess, which is preventing it
from erasing it. And then it tries to install Ubuntu to the old LVM
partition, instead of the actual drive.

The only solution that worked, again, was to boot the system to a live
environment and use dd to write some zeroes to the drive. After doing
this, it installed as expected.

And again: this is not me trying to install grub to a logical volume.
This happens by just telling Ubuntu to erase a drive and install a fresh
copy, where that drive had previously been configured with LVM.

Steps to duplicate:

1) Boot Live CD
2) Install Ubuntu with LVM on a drive
3) Boot Live CD
4) Run installer with option to "erase disk and install Ubuntu" and "use LVM"

That's it - I have done nothing else, I'm not trying to set up my own
weird partition scheme.

Expected behavior:

When you click "erase disk" option, it should unmount anything it has
mounted under the hood and erase the disk.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1241867

Title:
  installing with LVM over old install with LVM results in unable to
  install bootloader

Status in grub-installer package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Got this error about being unable to install the bootloader. I'm
  installing a clean 13.10, with the LVM option selected, over top of my
  previous 13.04 install (also had LVM enabled on that). I'm not doing
  an upgrade install.

  I tried manually partitioning and was unable to remove the pre-
  existing LVM setup which showed up under "dev-mapper". No matter what
  I tried to select, it was always "in use" and couldn't be removed.

  The only solution that worked was to partially overwrite the drive
  with dd (if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda) and do a clean install.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
  Package: ubiquity 2.15.26
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-12.19-generic 3.11.3
  Uname: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperVersion: 1.336ubuntu1
  Date: Fri Oct 18 18:56:07 2013
  InstallCmdLine: file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash -- maybe-ubiquity
  LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release amd64 (20131016.1)
  MarkForUpload: True
  ProcEnviron:
   TERM=linux
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  SourcePackage: grub-installer
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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