Qubes Installer needs update (Part 1 of 3)

[Ulrich Windl]

Hi!

The Qubes Installer for 4.0.3 has some severe bugs (it seems to me):
I installed Quebes OS 4.0 for the third time, so I should have a littel experience by now:
The only difference from last install I could remember was:
1) I installed on a M.2 SSD instead of a harddisk
2) I put the German keyboard on top of the English

Installation succeeded quikly without a problem, but when booting, the system does not come up. Most notably because it does not ask for the password of the LUKS partition that holds the VG.

I'll attach screen shots that show what the user can see. My suspect is that it's the German keyboard that is missing in the initrd, failing the password input.

First I capture what can be seen when no password prompt appears; catching the actual error was trickier. After the repeating dracut messages there didn't seem to happen anything more.

Regards,
Ulrich

[Ulrich Windl]

Hi!

Eventually I could solve the problem (using another Linux System):
For reasons completely unknown to me the partitions I had created
manually were not retained (I had a small second partition, and I had
erased both partitions created a second larger partition and two more):
However after successful installation the old partitions were back AND
LVM complained that the physical volume inside the LUKS is larger than
the partition. That was the clue I needed! So I checked the partitions
and found the partition was not what I had created (but the PV was the
one I had created). I could suspect anaconda reading the partition table
first, and then writing it back for no good reason (I said _I_ will
provide partitions).
Well the fix was (time consuming): I created the partitions from the
"other" Linux, then booted the installer again and did yet another
install. Now it booted! From SSD. Now really fast 8-)

So Qubes OS did not give a good error message when encountering that bug!

Regards,
Ulrich