Having nearly given up on fixing the hardware issues on my old laptop to get it to have both the wireless AND the keyboard working at any one time (some sort of ACPI issue :() I decided to try and install xubuntu a really old box.
By old I mean AMD 475Mhz old and when it eventually loaded up the installer it got so far as partitioning the disks and then failed! I thought it must be yet another hardware issue so gave up for a while. I tried again and this time booted into the live cd and tried to partition it manually - it failed with the following:
/dev/hda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
So, did a bit of digging about and it seems like its a long standing issue in some installations of Ubuntu based installs, but there is a fix that worked for me and to save anyone else that might be looking to fix this error I’ll post it here so you dont have to sift through forums or bug reports to find it:
From the bug report here:
vi /lib/partman/commit.d/30parted
Put ‘update-dev’ right after close_dialog.
#!/bin/sh
. /lib/partman/definitions.sh
for dev in $DEVICES/*; do
[ -d "$dev" ] || continue
cd $dev
open_dialog IS_CHANGED
read_line is_changed
close_dialog
[ "$is_changed" = yes ] || continue
disable_sap "$dev"
open_dialog COMMIT
close_dialog
update-dev
done
