reinstallation fails; possibly swap/encryption-related

Summary: After installing Mint 14 (64b) alongside Windows 8, I reran the installer (before rebooting) to change the file system for some partitions. The installer reported a number of errors, and I am currently unable to boot Mint without a DVD.

My hardware: A Lenovo T430s that came out of the box with Windows 8 on a 256GB SSD (/dev/sda), and an additional 1TB HDD (/dev/sdb). I'm using a USB DVD drive (/dev/sr0) for Mint 14 installation. I had to turn off various security options in the BIOS to be able to boot the DVD.

Preinstallation: I minimised the number of Win 8 partitions on the SSD. (Details: I removed the Win 8 recovery partition as I used some Windows tool to create a recovery option on a USB stick. This still left about three other small partitions on the SSD, and a main Win 8 partition.)

Original installation: Using the Mint installer, I reduced the size of the main Win 8 partition on the SSD to make room for the root and /boot Mint partitions, and partitioned the HDD for swap space, /var, /tmp, /home/m5l (my own home directory) and just /home (for guests, etc). All used ext3. (Details: a 206.9MiB /boot partition (/dev/sda6) and 165GiB / (root) partition (/dev/sda7) on the SDD, and /var (/dev/sdb1), /tmp (/dev/sdb2), /home/m5l (/dev/sdb4) and just /home (/dev/sdb5) on the HDD. The swap partition (/dev/sdb3) is 8GiB, with some empty space next to it so I can expand it if I add more RAM one day. I did this by creating a 32GiB swap partition before creating /home, then deleting the swap partition and recreating it as 8GiB. The installer complained about the lack of a biosgrub; there was 1MB of empty space at the beginning of the SSD so I just used that for it, and it became /dev/sda8. Maybe this will stuff up Windows recovery, but at this stage I don't care.)

Next steps: I clicked 'Install now', opted to encrypt my home directory (/home/m5l) and the installation seemed to go ahead with no problems.

Then I realised that it would be better to use ext4 on the SSD for trim support, so I decided just to run the installer again. I did NOT try booting after the installation finished; I continued using the OS session I booted from the DVD.

BUG 1: When I reran the installer, there was a /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 device, the same size as my swap drive. There was little explanation, and attempts to change or delete it did nothing and there was no option to reformat it.

I maintained the same partition configuration as above, except I made / and /boot ext4. I opted to reformat all the Linux drives.

BUG 2: After clicking 'Install now', after the time zone prompt appeared, an error dialogue appeared to complain about not being able to format the swap partition. Clicking OK or close did not dismiss the error dialogue, and I was not able to click past the time zone prompt. I used xkill to quit the installer. I tried a couple more times.

WORKAROUND: The error dialogue did not appear when I didn't specify any swap partition. Instead, when I clicked 'Install now', a dialogue warned that I'd be sorry, but I ignored it. The installation seemed to mostly complete, but in the end a rambly and apologetic dialogue entitled 'Installer crashed' appeared, promising a way to submit a bug report. That didn't work, so I'm submitting this report manually.

BUG 3: When I rebooted, nothing familiar like grub appeared; I just got Windows 8 again. boot-repair hangs. It seems the grub2 setup got messed up somehow; I'll add an update when I work it out.