Ubuntu Server installer woes

Geekery / November 5, 2024 / John / 1

Alright, Google, do your thing and make this available to other sysadmins don’t waste the ungodly amount of time on this that I did.

Scenario – you’re installing Ubuntu Server 20.04 / 22.04 / 24.04 on Dell hardware. You’re using hardware RAID. You may be rebuilding the machine or you may have moved some disks from another machine and cleared the foreign config.

You start the install. You may update to the new installer or stay with the old one – it doesn’t matter. It gets your keyboard settings, gets the network address, checks the repo is available and then BOOM:

Installer has encountered an internal error. Continue (which does nothing) or retry (which does the same).

The problem is the disk prober. It doesn’t like the broken / missing / inconsistent partition tables on your disk. Open each raid device (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc) in fdisk, write a new GPT partition table with g, ‘w’rite then ‘q’uit.

The installer will now run. You can do this while the installer is still flailing around by switching to a virtual console with ALT+F2 then back with ALT+F1.

John

UNIX geek, wannabe cook, musician, book-lover, and all round good-guy.