os-prober does not report contents of mounted filesystems

Your report is not very clear. Do I understand correctly that:

- Before installing Kubuntu, you had OS/2, Windows and Ubuntu installed
- The installer did not ask where to install GRUB

?

In my installation testing, I am always prompted if other operating systems are
detected.

Please attach a copy of /var/log/installer/syslog from your new Kubuntu system.

Created an attachment (id=1955)
syslog of stage 1 of kubuntu installation

You seem to have 8(!) partitions. Can you tell us what is installed on each one?

Partition usage:
hde1 = OS/2 Boot Manager
hde2 = swap area
hde3 = Windows 98
hde5 = User data
hde6 = Archive data
hde7 = Archive2 data
hde8 = Windows XP
sda1 = Ubuntu Linux (Gnome-Version)
sda5 = kubuntu Linux (KDE-Version)

I have repeated the installation and in the partitioning program I have not
defined the usage of the windows 98, windows XP and
Ubuntu (Gnome-Version) partitions, then the error is not present.
Then: The installation program recognized the Windows XP and the Ubuntu
partition and the user is asked where the grub is to install!!!

Could you attach /boot/grub/device.map and /boot/grub/menu.lst from the Kubuntu
installation, please?

(In reply to comment #6)
> Could you attach /boot/grub/device.map and /boot/grub/menu.lst from the Kubuntu
> installation, please?
The damaged system is scratched.
i cannot send you the needed data. Sorry.

also not booting it up from a liveCD?

The OS/2 Boot-Manager is reinstalled. After this all my Systems (without
kubuntu) are running.
The kubuntu-partition is scratched and reused.
I can boot all LiveCDs that I have, what should that do?

Does this problem still occur with the breezy/dapper install cds?

Is there any hope that this can be debugged?

This bug occurs because os-prober does not always manage to report the contents of mounted filesystems. This is a known bug, and is not fixed in Dapper as far as I know.

The conflict here is that we don't want os-prober to detect e.g. the filesystems mounted on /target for obvious reasons, but we do want it to look at other mounted filesystems. I think the correct approach here is for partman to write out a file with the list of filesystems that should not be checked by os-prober.

os-prober (1.20) unstable; urgency=low

  * Skip grub-installer's "(on /dev/blah)" entries detected in GRUB
    configuration files, as if they're useful they will probably be found by
    another probe, and detecting them can result in exponential growth of
    menu.lst files if you do repeated test installs on multiple partitions.
  * Use readlink -f in mapdevfs shim so that os-prober runs outside d-i
    handle mount-by-UUID correctly.
  * Use mktemp -d rather than /tmp, to make use outside d-i safer.
  * Merge from Ubuntu:
    - Try to install fs-core-modules and fs-secondary-modules udebs. These
      are specific to the Ubuntu kernel udeb layout, but it's fairly cheap
      to check for them as well and saves on divergence here.
    - Add os-probes/mounted/sparc/80solaris to recognize Solaris/SPARC
      (Fabio M. Di Nitto).
    - Add linux-boot-probes/mounted/sparc/50silo support (Fabio M. Di
      Nitto).
    - Try to load ufs module, for Solaris support (Fabio M. Di Nitto).
    - Tighten check for whether we're running in d-i; anna-install isn't
      quite enough because if you're running d-i code outside d-i it's
      sometimes reasonable to install a shim for anna-install.
  * Don't probe partitions mounted on /target/boot.
  * Teach linux-boot-prober to deal with mounted partitions correctly,
    unless they're mounted on /, /target, or /target/boot (LP: #14780). This
    should largely obsolete the --mounted option.
  * Only use /target/bin/mount if it exists, in order to work better outside
    d-i.

os-prober (1.19) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Joey Hess ]
  * Make the microsoft OS test completely case-insensative in the file and
    directory named it looks for. This is reportedly needed at least for
    Vista (Boot/BCD vs boot/bcd), and was already done on an ad-hoc basis
    for 2000/XP/NT4.0.
  * Patch from VMiklos to add support for recognising Frugalware.

  [ Frans Pop ]
  * Skip partitions on a physical disk that is part of a Serial ATA RAID disk.
  * Use log-output when checking for volume groups.
  * Also use the case insensitive test for Dell Utility partition detection.

  [ Fabio M. Di Nitto ]
  * Skip partitions that have the "whole_disk" sysfs attribute set.
    The kernel set the attribute for partitions like SUN Whole Disk.
    These partitions that encompass the whole disk can be mounted
    and often confused for the first partition on the disk.
    In situations where the OS is on the first partition, it would be
    detected twice in the first and the whole disk partition.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:45:47 +0100