What Did I Do Wrong? 24.04 Clean Install

Support and Help
, ,
1

I have successfully rebuilt my pc so I have no ‘request for help’ as such. However, I am interested in what I did incorrectly using the 24.04 Live CD.

Objective:
Clean install of 24.04 onto hd that has lvm. Create two logical volumes, one for / and one for /home

Procedure:
Boot to live CD (24.04). Installed lvm2. Using gparted created a 200mb fat32 partition with flags set to efi and boot. Rest of HD configured as ext4 (shown as sda2 on my system). Via terminal:

sudo pvcreate /dev/sda2
sudo vgcreate vg01 /dev/sda2
sudo lvcreate -n root -L50G vg01
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg01/root
sudo lvcreate -n home -L100G vg01
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg01/home

At this point I’m ready to install 24.04. Using the Live CD 24.04 installer I get to the point where I chose ‘Something Else’ for the manual install part of the process. After scanning the disk I’m presented with a screen showing:

sda1 vfat 209.72mb
sda2 239.85GB

(At this point I’m saying “where is the lv for / and the lv for /home?”)

I shutdown the pc and reboot using a 22.04 Live CD. I get to the point where I choose ‘Something Else’. After scanning the disk I’m now presented with:

/dev/mapper/vg01-root ext4
/dev/mapper/vg01-home ext4

At this point I’m able to install / into my lv created for / and /home into the lv created for /home.

The GUI options I had to install, using the 24.04 Live CD, was similar/the same as when one uses gparted to ‘look’ at a lvm disk. It cannot ‘see’ any logical volumes. However, the 22.04 Live CD did ‘see’ the logical volumes and allowed me to point / and /home to the correct locations.

I guess one answer might be to use the terminal to do this procedure but a) it is complicated if you do not know how to do it and need to learn (I could not do this using the terminal without some reading) b) surely this is the whole point of the Live CD GUI environment (you do not have to use the terminal) and c) how come the 22.04 Live CD can read a lvm structure but the 24.04 CD cannot?

2

This seems like a bug in the new installer. If I get a chance later today, I’ll test it in a VM, unless someone else can answer your question.

Incidentally, these days, it’s recommended to use a much larger partition for the EFI; 200 MB can cause problems down the line. I know that Windows makes a tiny partition (on my test machine, it created just 100 MB), but I would use 500 MB.

If this is the only system on your disk, you might like to let the Ubuntu installer manage everything, allowing you to use full-disk encryption. If you choose to use the entire disk, the installer will create the partitions for EFI, boot and LUKS; inside the LUKS partition, you’ll have a LVM system with root. You won’t have separate (logical) partitions for root and home, but that’s probably OK, unless you have a specific need to have them separate. It will save you a ton of hassle.

3

It’s not your fault. The installer used by 24.04 is not capable of detecting existing LVM structure in the manual (custom) installation option. This deficiency was discussed a lot in the old forum when the current installer first became available (I think in 23.04) There are bug reports which have gone nowhere. The only way now to do an LVM install is to use the erase disk and install with the LVM (advanced option).

If you have an existing Ubuntu LVM install, use the in-place upgrade done by either Software Updater, or ‘do-release-upgrade’ in terminal. These preserve the existing partitioning. I’ve been doing that.

Bug report

Another bug report

2 Likes
4

You could use the server installer then install the “desktop” package of your choosing. May work around the issue. The “ubuntu-desktop” metapackage will give the default Ubuntu desktop as you need

2 Likes
5

I’ve tested this, and I get the same results as you.

Thank you for the bug reports. There seem to be three related ones in total:

I have voted for all three of them. @quarkrad, you might want to vote for them as well (log in, and select the green writing at the top left). The more votes the better.

1 Like