1

I have a minimal Ubuntu Server 16.04 installation on an old x86_64 desktop PC. Tried installing graphic UI with tasksel (selected Lubuntu desktop and OpenSSH Server), but near 90% of process at Configuring memtest86+ I got the following error:

EXT4-fs (sda3): write access unavailable, cannot proceed
EXT4-fs (sda1): write access unavailable, cannot proceed

and now tasksel is stalled.

The whole sda disk is not actually mounted, root and home directories are mounted from sdb1 and sdb3. The system boots from the sdb disk (it's selected in BIOS). Swap uses sdb2 partition. So I'm not sure why sda got involved.

How can I fix it or interrupt the process without breaking things?

Via another console I mounted sda1 and sda3, but of course tasksel is still frozen.

Also, tasksel was started by root user, ps -ef shows it as root's process.

xealits
  • 242
  • 2
  • 12
  • You need to inspect what does your /etc/fstab. Do a recovery-mode boot, so you must mount -o remount, rw /and see where is sda in fstab file. – Redbob Sep 26 '17 at 14:07
  • ok, I killed tasksel process, ran sudo dpkg --configure -a with sda partitions mounted, it seems nothing broke.. – xealits Sep 26 '17 at 17:07

1 Answers1

0

It seems nothing bad happened from killing tasksel process, thus I post it as an answer.

I killed tasksel process and ran usual commands to clean up and fix package system:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo dpkg --configure -a

dpkg --configure -a command froze for a second and I mounted sda partitions. It found Fedora distribution on that disk and finished fixing packages successfully. My guess is that grub configuration needed access to the disk.

xealits
  • 242
  • 2
  • 12