Comment 3 for bug 260001

Actually, we added 256-byte inode support to grub a while back:

grub (0.97-29ubuntu19) hardy; urgency=low

  [ David Futcher ]
  * debian/presubj: Fixed spelling mistake (LP: #177540)

  [ Tormod Volden ]
  * debian/update-grub: use >> instead of > when writing to existing files
    so that the script continues to work if noclobber is set. LP: #155423

  [ Steve Langasek ]
  * debian/patches/ext3_256byte_inode.diff: new patch cherry-picked from
    Debian to support 256-byte inodes in ext3, for compatibility with recent
    e2fsprogs upstream defaults. Thanks Stefan Lippers-Hollmann.

 -- Steve Langasek <email address hidden> Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:12:40 -0700

I suspect this is actually something else. I notice a chain of errors in your syslog starting with this:

Aug 21 08:34:43 ubuntu ubiquity: Package `linux-image-2.6.26-5-generic' is not installed and no info is available.
Aug 21 08:34:43 ubuntu ubiquity: Use dpkg --info (= dpkg-deb --info) to examine archive files,
Aug 21 08:34:43 ubuntu ubiquity: and dpkg --contents (= dpkg-deb --contents) to list their contents.
Aug 21 08:34:43 ubuntu ubiquity: /usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure: linux-image-2.6.26-5-generic is not installed.

In other words, the kernel package that should correspond to what's on the live CD wasn't copied onto the hard disk! It's not clear to me why this might be happening; perhaps some kind of file-copying problem, and perhaps Alpha 4 was just hosed in some way I've forgotten about. Can you reproduce this with Alpha 5?