I have now confirmed this bug to be hardware independent by reproducing
it in a VirtualBox VM. I have also now tested this technique using the
current Jaunty images, and found it to work correctly in Jaunty as well
as Hardy. So it appears to me that only Intrepid is affected by this
bug. I was informed in IRC that it's highly unlikely that anyone will
attempt to debug the issue in Intrepid, and as Jaunty appears
unaffected, that I should just forget about this bug. On the off chance
that anyone cares to reproduce this bug, I will supply the exact steps I
followed to reproduce the issue in a Virtual Machine:

1) Create a VM
2) Partition the virtual HDD
   sda1  ext2  2gb
   sda2  swap  512mb
   sda3  ext2  1gb
   sda4  ext2  4.5gb
3) Install grub to MBR, grub files to sda1/boot/grub
4) copy these 3 files to the root of sda3
   
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/initrd.gz
   
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/vmlinuz
   http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.10/ubuntu-8.10-alternate-i386.iso
5) edit sda1/boot/grub/menu.lst to include:
   title Ubuntu Alternate Installer (on /dev/sda3)
   root (hd0,2)
   kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 ramdisksize=128000
   initrd /initrd.gz
6) reboot the machine, booting the alternate installer entry
7) answer the installer questions, and when the "[!!] Partition Disks" step is 
reached, no HDD will be available to partition, though swapping to the busybox 
shell and using fdisk will show the HDD fine.

To show that this technique works in Hardy and Jaunty, just replace the
files in step 4) with the ones appropriate for the other versions, and
when "[!!] Partition Disks" is reached, the HDD is available to be
partitioned.

It may be possible to reproduce this bug with a simpler partitioning
scheme, but I did not attempt any other schemes.

Anyway, I'm done with this bug, unless someone contacts me requesting
more information. I'm going to use Hardy on the machine in question
until Jaunty is officially released, then I may upgrade to Jaunty.

Tom

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intrepid alternate install fails when booted from hdd
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/310260
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