First of all, kudos to all the guys behind Ubuntu distribution from the maintainers, committers, developers and to all those people that made this release (10.04) possible. The Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is a kick-ass release! Effin insane boot-time!

Now lets go back to the problem which I’ve encountered first hand during installation and after the installation process. There’s three(3) actually, so I’m gonna go through each and every one of them but the solution is quite simple:

Problem #1: No partition found

I have Windows 7 installed on my hard drive but I planned to replace it with Ubuntu and use the entire disk (totally wiping out the Windows partition). But when I get to the “Prepare partitions” window, I see no partition. If you encountered this problem, here’s what you do:

1. Click the “Back” button (It’ll take you back to the “Keyboard layout” window)
2. Once you’re in the “Keyboard layout” window, Press “Ctrl + Alt + F1” to go to terminal mode.

(On terminal mode) Type-in “sudo apt-get remove dmraid” then hit “Enter” key. (Ignore any error that you see cause it’ll not matter)

3. Return to GUI mode by pressing “Ctrl + Alt + F7”, now you may continue on with the installation process.

The problem is due to Dmraid (fake raid) is active by default and are supported out-of-the-bot on the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop CD.

Problem #2: dmraid shared libraries loading problem on boot startup

Now this problem is I think caused by the solution made for the previous problem (Problem #1).
I think it didn’t entirely remove the reference to dmraid, so it is still trying to load the dmraid libraries on boot-time. On boot-time (before the splash screen) you’ll get a nasty error, saying:

dmraid: error while loading shared libraries...

Now the solution to that is removing the dmraid support entirely. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Once Ubuntu desktop is loaded, open a “Terminal” (Accessories → Terminal).
2. On terminal window, type-in “sudo apt-get remove dmraid” and hit “Enter” key.
3. After removing dmraid, restart your PC (soft reboot).

There you have it! Problem solved.

Problem #3: Blank window or no “Welcome” window

I’ve booted the installation CD on my laptop but after the loading part it popups a blank window and no options were shown. So obviously I cannot continue with the installation. But after a few trial and error , I’ve finally found a solution to get the installation window to work (show the installation options).

Here’s the solution:

1. Boot from CD and when it starts on booting press “F6” key to go to the boot installation options (live CD, disc check, memory test, language, accessibility, etc).
2. When you get to the installation option screen, press “F6” for “Other Options” (boot options).
3. Select “nomodeset” by using the arrow key and pressing the “Enter” key to mark it.
4. Press “Esc” key and continue with the installation by choosing “Install Ubuntu” and then pressing the “Enter” key.

That’s it. I hope the solutions given above helps.

Cheers!