Installer crashes if installing Kubuntu 19.04 to a pre-formatted partition

[Dave Rove]

Error messages are generated if you format a partition before the installation, then install Kubuntu 19.04 to that partition without requesting that it be formatted during the installation.

At the end of the installation, a pop-up message appears:

Error restoring installed applications.
An error occurred while restoring previously-installed applications. The installation will continue, but you may have to manually reinstall some applications after the computer reboots.

Hit OK on that, and a fatal-sounding pop-up error message appears:

Installation failed.
The installer encountered an unrecoverable error. A desktop session will now be run so that you may investigate the problem or try installing again.

Hit OK on that and it does return to the installer's live-desktop. If you then reboot, the new installation actually seems to have been installed undamaged.

A lesser-version of the same bug happens with Ubuntu 19.04. The first popup message appears as above, but next popup is not "unrecoverable error" but "installation complete", and it prompts for restart. I've raised a bug report for that here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...y/+bug/1825355

Since the Kubuntu version of the bug is a bit more serious, should a bug report be raised against Kubuntu do you think? If so, where?

[verndog]

Look at the logs at "/var/log/installer" especially syslog.

[Dave Rove]

If you look at the Ubuntu bug report that I linked, I attached the recommended files (degug, partman, and syslog) as a tarfile because I couldn't figure out how to attach multiple files to a launchpad bug report. With Ubuntu, those files had been copied by the installer to /var/log/installer in the partition being installed, so after booting back into my main OS, I was able to find those files in that directory. With Kubuntu, that directory was absent from the partition that had been installed, presumably because the more serious installer crash had forestalled the copying process.

I've just re-run the Kubuntu installation, and when it dropped back to the live-desktop, I found the files in the live-desktop's filesystem (presumably in a ram-disk) so I've grabbed a copy of those:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/36az775gi...D3svddpga?dl=0

There's tracebacks from Ubiquity's python scripts about 200 lines before the end of syslog, so I guess that's showing where the problem is.