Comments on: Installing Ubuntu 8.10 Alternate with a USB Drive

By: yungchin

yungchin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:02:54 +0000

Many thanks – I just used this to install Ubuntu 9.04 (for which the hd-media archive path needs to say ‘jaunty’ of course) and it’s perfect. Not only saves a CDR, but a lot of time, too.

I did see the same yenta_socket modprobing error that Tarun mentioned. Every time the installer was scanning buses for hardware (networking, disks, etc), it tried to load the yenta_socket (cardbus) module and threw an error. My guess is that the hd-media vmlinuz image lacks the right hooks for that module, or something like that. I don’t have cardbus devices so it wasn’t a problem. Also, after rebooting into the fresh install there are no problems with the module anymore.

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:54:06 +0000

Top stuff, spend ages trawling through Ubuntu’s documentation following instructions that are either wrong or ambiguous. This worked off the bat for Xubuntu 9.04.

By: Jet

Jet — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:31:47 +0000

Lifesaver! Many thanks

By: JirkaS

JirkaS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:17:57 +0000

Hi,
I hit exactly same problem before few weeks. After a lot of googling and reboots I found both the problem and solution.
The problem is that if some partition of your local harddisk is already mounted, the partition manager don’t show entire disk…
Partition is mounted because installer looks for an .iso image on all available partitions.
Solution is easy. Switch to different virtual terminal, umount all local disk partitions and run partition manager again.
Umounting is little tricky, because partitions are mounted on the same mount point and USB stick is usually last one. So use ‘umount -l’ and don’t be scared, if your USB stick looks unmounted as well. It works!

By: Jesse

Jesse — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:19:58 +0000

This page also has a lot of good info on troubleshooting the installation, some of which is applicable to booting from a USB drive:
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/boot-troubleshooting.html

By: Jesse

Jesse — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:17:08 +0000

Tarun,

I don’t think that the yenta_socket error would be related to the problem with partitioning the disks. There are a couple of possibilities here. One is that your computer’s IDE or SATA controller is not currently supported. Since you only have 256MB of RAM, it sounds like you have an older computer. But if you have a newer computer, you could try a development version of Ubuntu and see if that works with your disks. The other possibility is that you may need some extra boot parameters to be able to access the hard drive. Try looking at this page for some help on using boot parameters and troubleshooting the installation process: https://help.ubuntu.com/8.10/installation-guide/i386/boot-parms.html

If you are still having trouble, please post some info on what type of computer you have, etc. so that I can try to help.

Jesse

By: Tarun Singal

Tarun Singal — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:37:00 +0000

Hi,

I am trying to install ubuntu 8.10 from usb drive and using alternate cd as i have 256 MB RAM. I have winxp and i want to use one of its partitions for ubuntu(dual boot configuration).

I followed the procedure provided by you and it all went fine except while installing some yenta_socket error came. Anyways i continued from it and reached partition manager.

Now the problem started. The partition manager is only showing the usb drive space and not any of my pc hard disk partitions where i want to install ubuntu.

Please suggest something to resolve this problem.

Thanks waiting for your reply.

Tarun.