[Bug 1582899] Re: in-target: mkinitramfs: failed to determine device for /

[Miriam España Acebal]

Hi,

I came across this old bug while doing some clearance.

Xenial reached EOSS (End of Standard Support) so I'm afraid it can't be
fixed. It is unfortunate that we were unable to resolve this defect,
however, there appears to be no further action possible at this time
because it's not a security bug. We are sorry that we do not always have
the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have
been many changes in Ubuntu since the time you reported the bug and your
problem may have been fixed with some of the updates.

As far as I could read in the thread, after a lot of research work
(great @tj, thankyou!) and after some doubt as to whether it was the
base installer or the live-installer that was the culprit here, the last
suggestion was about live-installer. As it's already marked as
"Incomplete" at the time I'm writing this, I'm going to mark
"Incomplete" as well with respect to base-installer and initramfs-tools.
If you consider it's happening still on Bionic or Focal (since Focal is
lat time *-installer are present on the series) and you have more
information that can shed light on this issue, please feel free to
comment and to add it and mark again this bug as "New".


** Changed in: base-installer (Ubuntu Bionic)
       Status: New => Incomplete

** Changed in: initramfs-tools (Ubuntu Bionic)
       Status: New => Incomplete

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to base-installer in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1582899

Title:
  in-target: mkinitramfs: failed to determine device for /

Status in base-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in initramfs-tools package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in live-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete
Status in base-installer source package in Xenial:
  Won't Fix
Status in initramfs-tools source package in Xenial:
  Won't Fix
Status in live-installer source package in Xenial:
  Won't Fix
Status in base-installer source package in Bionic:
  Incomplete
Status in initramfs-tools source package in Bionic:
  Incomplete
Status in live-installer source package in Bionic:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Sysadmin reported in #ubuntu (later #ubuntu-kernel) the 16.04 ubuntu-
  server ISO installer failed due to being unable to configure linux-
  image-4.4.0-21-generic.

  Lots of diagnostics and one SSH remote session later we seem to have
  narrowed it down to the installer.

  At the installer's boot menu the F6 option "Expert mode" is chosen.

  During initial ram file-system creation (after the kernel image is installed) the /dev/ file-system is not mounted in /target/ and therefore
  the initramfs-tools/hook-functions::dep_add_modules_mount() cannot match
  the mount device of "/" (in this case /dev/sda3) with any node under /dev/ which only contains static entries.

  Cause appears to be that live-installer.postinst has the crucial step
  calling library.sh:setup_dev() commented out:

  #waypoint 1 setup_dev

  OS=linux
  setup_dev() calls setup_dev_${OS}
  setup_dev_linux() mounts procfs and devtmpfs into /target/

  ----

  Originally the cause of the error message appeared to be that the
  symlink names in /dev/disk/by-uuid/  haven't been updated after the
  partitioning stage if there were pre-existing partitions and file-
  systems on the install device, *and* the sysadmin chose to format the
  existing partitions when selecting mountpoints.

  In this case a hardware RAID device presents:

  /dev/sda1 (/boot/)
  /dev/sda2 (swap)
  /dev/sda3 (/)

  From the shell I noticed:

  root at tmpstorage:/# ll /dev/disk/by-uuid/
  total 0
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May 17 19:39 130e4419-4bfd-46d2-87f9-62e5379bf591 -> ../../sda1
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May 17 19:39 127d3fa1-c07c-48e4-9e26-1b926d37625c -> ../../sda3
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 May 17 19:39 78b88456-2b0b-4265-9ed2-5db61522d887 -> ../../sda2
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   9 May 17 19:39 2016-04-20-22-45-29-00 -> ../../sr1
  drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 May 17 19:39 ..
  drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 May 17 19:39 .

  root at tmpstorage:/# blkid /dev/sda*
  /dev/sda: PTUUID="a84e60fd" PTTYPE="dos"
  /dev/sda1: UUID="61365714-8ff7-47a2-8035-8aed9e3191a6" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-01"
  /dev/sda2: UUID="78b88456-2b0b-4265-9ed2-5db61522d887" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-02"
  /dev/sda3: UUID="75f68451-9472-47c7-9efc-ed032bfa9987" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="a84e60fd-03"

  More details to follow.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-installer/+bug/1582899/+subscriptions