Harddisk installation fails

[James Laska]

On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 16:23 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 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. 

Ah, that could be part of the problem.  Will need to dig a bit more
though.

> 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

Thanks, can you also show me (or upload to the bugzilla) ...

# mount/dev/sda5 /media
# find /media -type f

> Files vmlinuz and initrd.img are copied from the 'isolinux' dir and
> are booted with GRUB in MBR. 

Great, that's a much faster way to boot the installer.  I've not
recently used the isolinux/initrd.img, I typically use
images/pxeboot/initrd.img.  Mental note for the future, we may need a
test to ensure these files are the *same* (or similar enough).  They
aren't at the moment, but only because the .buildstamp in each
initrd.img differs.  I'm not sure why, would need to consult release
engineering.

Summary, using isolinux/{vmlinuz,initrd.img} shouldn't change the
outcome of this test.

> 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).

I think the key variables here are the installer and the contents of the
partition /dev/sda5 used.

Thanks,
James

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