Hi,
Kevin Locke <[email protected]> wrote (Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:04:53 -0600):
> I can confirm that the ISO from Salsa CI does not produce the
> "Partition(s) 1 on /dev/sda have been written, but [...]" error
> message. However, it does still overwrite the USB stick. Is that
> expected? I've attached an updated script to reproduce the issue with
> the ISO from Salsa in QEMU.
>
> >>> For automatic partitioning using an entire disk:
> >>> - skip the disk with a mounted partition
> >>> "Skip" means that the disk is not added to the available disk list.
> >
> > This will require extra changes in partman-auto, and maybe partman-auto-*.
>
> If I write the ISO[1] to a USB stick and boot it (on either real
> hardware or QEMU) without modification or preseed:
>
> - If I select "Guided - use the largest continuous free space" it
> installs to the USB stick in new partitions added after the ones
> from the ISO. The bootloader is overwritten so the USB stick boots
> to the new installation and the installer is no longer accessible.
> - If I select "Guided - use whole disk" it overwrites the USB stick.
> (This is expected until changes are made to parman-auto?)
> - If I select "Manual" it appears that all partitions can be changed,
> removed, or discarded by selecting the whole disk.
>
> Note: I don't see /dev/sda in /proc/mounts. Is that expected with how
> isohybrid images are loaded? Could that explain why I'm not seeing
> any partitions locked? And why it didn't produce the "failed to
> reread partition table [...] partitions in use" error message? Or
> perhaps I'm testing it wrong?
We (Pascal and me) already noticed, that the test with the ISO produced
by Salsa CI is not 100% realistic.
The underlying concept of that images means, that the installation image
is not mounted to /cdrom.
And that means, that Pascal's changes do not take effect.
So, we should have mentioned, that while testing you need to take some
extra tour:
Go through the installation until the "Partitioning hard drives" step. When you
go to "Manual" there, you see all your drives including your USB stick listed.
Write down, which device your USB stick is, for example "sda".
If you are not sure, look for the size of the drives; your USB stick is
probably something like 4 or 16 GB).
Then, you have to say "Go back" and then select "Execute a shell" from
the menu. There you will have to mount the device, which is hosting the
installation image, to /cdrom, with the following two commands:
mkdir /cdrom
mount -t iso9660 /dev/sda /cdrom
(here, I assume your USB stick is sda !!!
If your stick has another device notation, adapt the command
accordingly!)
Then say "exit" on the shell and you will come back to the partitioning step.
Now, you should no longer see your USB stick in the list of devices :-)
Holger
--
Holger Wansing <[email protected]>
PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508 3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076
