Harddisk installation fails

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:37:15 -0400, James wrote:

> > >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=627789
> > >>
> > >> Brian notes in that report - "Hit ok and a blank repe edit dialog is
> > >> shown. Hit cancel and it then finds the correct repositories and
> > >> proceeds with the install."
> > >>
> > >> so you could try that.
> > > 
> > > That is how I ended up with a broken "transparent" http install from
> > > a stale mirror, getting the old non-working firstboot package. The
> > > "Installation Repo" will be missing due to the error and clicking
> > > Cancel.
> 
> I have completed several hard drive ISO (HDISO) installations of
> F-14-Beta without error.  I'd like to understand more about the setup
> used to ensure our test case [1], and the steps you are following, are
> in sync.
> 
> When you say hard drive install, you are referring to the process of
> copying the DVD ISO (or CD ISO) images to a hard disk partition, as
> detailed in the installation guide sections below?
> 
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Installation_Guide/ch04s07.html
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Installation_Guide/s1-begininstall-hd-x86.html
>

Yes.

On the test machine, partition sda5 contains an ext3 fs and several subdirs
to hold the ISO images for various distributions. Fedora 14 Beta RC3 i386
DVD ISO was put into /14 and a copy of the 'images' directory placed at
/14/images:

# mount /dev/sda5 mnt/1 -o ro ; ll mnt/1/14 ; umount mnt/1
total 3569928
-rw-rw-r--. 1 root root        726 Sep 21 18:56 Fedora-14-Beta-i386-CHECKSUM
-rw-rw-r--. 1 root root 3616593920 Sep 21 21:45 Fedora-14-Beta-i386-DVD.iso
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root       4096 Sep 21 22:15 images
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root   31546058 Sep 21 05:01 initrd.img
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root       4096 Sep 23 18:06 mnt
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root    3868064 Sep 21 05:01 vmlinuz

Files vmlinuz and initrd.img are copied from the 'isolinux' dir and
are booted with GRUB in MBR. After choosing hard-disk as installation
source, I point Anaconda at /dev/sda5 and path /14, and it happily
loads and starts the graphical installer.

This has worked fine with Fedora 13 (and various older dist releases).