Let me try one last time to separate the issues. ** The UEFI issue (a side issue)
The installer works in two completely different ways, depending on whether the system booted via UEFI or BIOS. But it does not show whether it is installing in UEFI or BIOS mode. Hence the user has little way, short of guesswork, to know how to partition the system correctly. Many systems can boot from a USB stick in either mode. If you don't tell it, you get whatever the system chose. So: (1) The installer *could* tell you which mode it's running in, but it doesn't. If you don't realise you've booted via UEFI mode and that the system is going to configure UEFI booting, and decide to partition manually, then you don't realise that you need a UEFI boot partition. (2) The system *could* warn you that you have a missing UEFI boot partition when installing in UEFI mode, but it doesn't. Those points have now been raised separately in issue #1609715. However the only relevance here is it gives a way to reproduce the main problem. ** Broken recovery mode (the main issue) The point I tried to raise in this issue is the brokenness of recovery mode when you have a system with some sort of corruption. The UEFI missing-boot-partition problem is just one specific way to reproduce the brokenness in recovery mode. Reproducible cases are good; they allow things to be fixed. There are however many other different ways the system could be broken and recovery mode would not work. With an older version of Ubuntu, I could simply log in, poke around, look at logs, find the problem and fix it. With ubuntu 16.04, I have now experienced a situation where recovery mode is broken. I described what happens at the top of this issue. Basically you can start a recovery shell, and 50% of your keystrokes are thrown away; and then a few minutes later the recovery shell quits and recovery mode locks up. I suspect this is something to do with systemd sitting in the background launching stuff when it thinks dependencies have been met, and terminating stuff when it thinks it would be a good idea to do so. For recovery mode, I just want a shell. Let me do my job. Please spawn me a shell connected to the console, reliably. That's it. No shells vanishing and reappearing. No timeouts because filesystems haven't yet been mounted or because networking is not up. That's the whole point of recovery mode - to have sufficient access to be able to fix those things. For now, the best workaround seems to be to boot from an Ubuntu 14.04 USB, and then mount the system disk. But it makes me sad that 16.04 has become less good in this respect than it was before. It seems to be a regression in how easy it is to recover a broken system. Of course, this only affects systems which require some sort of maintenance - but it's a fact of life that systems *do* get into states which require fixing. That's it. If you have never had to use recovery mode, and hence don't care about it, then you are lucky. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1609475 Title: recovery mode completely broken by systemd To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1609475/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
