Missing dependency on mtools causes hang on "Starting Up"

Same thing here. It refuses to quit too, the quit button doesn't work. How disappointing.

vadi@ubuntu:~$ usb-creator

-- Starting up at 12:09:20 --
[12:09:20] new device:
{'capacity': dbus.UInt64(2041012736L), 'uuid': '8C40-3F1C', 'label': '', 'free': 1380974592, 'fstype': 'vfat', 'device': '/dev/sdc', 'mountpoint': '/media/disk', 'udi': '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_8C40_3F1C'}
[12:09:20] adding: /dev/sdc
[12:09:24] mounting /home/vadi/ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64.iso
[12:09:24] updating dest_status as part of update_row_state
[12:09:25] Installing...
[12:09:25] Source CD: /home/vadi/ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64.iso
[12:09:25] Destination disk: /dev/sdc
[12:09:25] Persistence size: 128 MB
[12:09:30] Forcing shutdown of the install process.
[12:09:30] Forcing shutdown of the install process.
[12:09:31] Forcing shutdown of the install process.
vadi@ubuntu:~$

I encountered this bug as well.
I saw that someone mentioned this problem in irc, and developer asked for strace of install.py process, but that process is not even started.

same here. I run it with python -v but this is how it ends:

{'capacity': dbus.UInt64(4043309056L), 'uuid': 'B867-3D31', 'label': 'PILLEPALLE', 'free': 4024537088L, 'fstype': 'vfat', 'device': '/dev/sdb', 'mountpoint': '/tmp/tmpRsZAsL', 'udi': '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_B867_3D31'}
[14:52:05] adding: /dev/sdb
[14:53:24] mounting /home/data/Azureus Downloads/ubuntu-8.10-alternate-i386.iso
[14:53:25] updating dest_status as part of update_row_state
[14:53:33] Installing...
[14:53:33] Source CD: /home/data/Azureus Downloads/ubuntu-8.10-alternate-i386.iso
[14:53:33] Destination disk: /dev/sdb
[14:53:33] Persistence size: 128 MB

After that it is stuck, pressing "cancel" does not work.

Hi, same errors here using Ubuntu 8.10 started from the LiveCD option.

Done some debugging. My 8 Gb USB stick had one large vfat partition. Somehow, usb-creator could not detect this partition, it would get stuck at the message: "Persistence size: 128 MB".

So I installed gparted and deleted this partition and created 2 new fat16 partition of 4 GB each. Next, usb-creator worked fine.

The error seems to come from install_bootloader(self) in /usr/share/pyshared/usbcreator/backend.py because the line "tmp = device.lstrip(rootdev)" would return no value.

I had a single 1GB FAT16 partition (created by Windows XP) on my drive (1GB total), and used gparted to remove the old partition and create a new FAT16 partition. This also resolved my issue.

Thanks pg4i for posting your solution.

Same problem here.
Simple does nothing.
Stay in Starting up hours.

This is what i did.
My usb disk was in vfat (1Gb).
I formated it in ext3 (you will lose all data in the usb drive):

- umount /media/disk

- sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb
(Caution: Careful while entering device/partition name; wrong name can wipe out entire hard disk!!!)

and now when i start usb-creator it tell me to format the disk (yes, again)...
and it works.

So...it does not works with one usb disk formated in vfat?

Success story! I used to get only to the point where:

[20:20:25] Installing...
[20:20:25] Source CD: /home/konrad/Download/ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso
[20:20:25] Destination disk: /dev/sdc1
[20:20:25] Persistence size: 6366 MB
[20:20:25] Marking partition 1 as active.
[20:20:25] installing the bootloader to /dev/sdc1.
[20:20:25] Forcing shutdown of the install process.

and nothing happened. It turned out (after some printf-debugging in backend.py) that I had no 'mtools' installed. I installed mtools and that problem was gone.

You can check if that is your problem by looking up the device of your USB drive's single partition (e.g. /dev/sdc1) and trying the command

  sudo syslinux /dev/sdc1 # if /dev/sdc1 is your USB stick's VFAT partition, better check twice

If mtools are missing, syslinux will complain.

I installed mtools... now it is working on my machine.

Thanks.

Similar bug for me, I ran sudo syslinux /dev/sde1 and it complained about only working on 512 byte sectors. If syslinux doesn't like it, I suppose it won't work, but usb-creator shouldn't hang forever like this.

Same bug here (Ubuntu 8.10 i386).
But when usb-creator crashed, it left a partition mounted.
I had to unmount first before using gparted.

also having similar problems and fixed by installing mtools.

Can somebody add mtools as a dependency for the usb-creator package?

I don't understand : I've installed mtools and I still have usb-creator hanging :

-- Starting up at 11:59:13 --
[11:59:13] new device:
{'capacity': dbus.UInt64(8086618112L), 'uuid': '19BA-5EAB', 'label': '', 'free': 7813693440L, 'fstype': 'vfat', 'device': '/dev/sdb', 'mountpoint': '/media/disk', 'udi': '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_19BA_5EAB'}
[11:59:13] adding: /dev/sdb
[11:59:17] mounting /home/ploum/jaunty-desktop-i386.iso
[11:59:17] updating dest_status as part of update_row_state
[11:59:19] Installing...
[11:59:19] Source CD: /home/ploum/jaunty-desktop-i386.iso
[11:59:19] Destination disk: /dev/sdb
[11:59:19] Persistence size: 0 MB

As far as I can tell there are 2 bugs described in this report. On the one hand we have the people who didn't have mtools installed; that's easily solved.

On the other hand we have the bug which was pointed out in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/295212/comments/6

I had a look at the exact problem at that seems that be that usb-creator is not happy at all when you are trying to install a bootable image on the device directly instead of on a partition of the device. So if you install it on /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1, it craches. device.lstrip returns "" instead of the partition number and from there on the regexp hangs for some reason, making the whole program hang in the "starting up" fase.

Since I don't know usb-creator well enough I can't post a fix for the application; but at least as a work-around: just reformat the drive so that you have at least 1 partition sdb1 formatted in vfat. (gparted can help you with this).

I think that the requirements are to have the key with (at least) one partition and formated with fat32.

This bug was fixed in the package usb-creator - 0.2.7

---------------
usb-creator (0.2.7) karmic; urgency=low

  [ Evan Dandrea ]
  * Add PolicyKit support (LP: #273483).
  * Move logging back to the home directory, now that usb-creator is run as a
    regular user (LP: #431266).
  * Use GIO instead of gnomevfs. Only lookup GNOME device names and
    icons as needed.
  * Remove the device in the DeviceKit-disks backend when it's removed
    from the system.
  * Only set the non-size columns to expand to fill available space in the GTK+
    frontend. Set a minimum width of 75px for all columns.
  * Add the missing retry dialog to the GTK+ frontend.
  * Fix a deadlock when the failed dialog runs.
  * Explicitly depend on mtools, just in case someone removes it and
    expects usb-creator to still work (LP: #295212).
  * Re-enable the format button now that Devicekit-disks 007 has been
    released.
  * Depend on DeviceKit-disks >= 007.
  * Freeze exception (LP: #432542).
  * Update translations from Launchpad.

  [ Roderick B. Greening ]
  * Bump version in setup.py, kde_about.py, usb-creator-gtk, and man to 0.2.7
  * Remove completed TODO items
  * Update some message strings for translations
  * Add the missing retry dialog to the KDE frontend.
  * Update man pages to reflect new log file location
  * In devicekit backend, ensure mount is empty string '' rather than empty
    dbus.Array to prevent crashes in os.statvfs from misc.py

 -- Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:02:28 -0700