On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:58 AM, Liam Proven <lproven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
/dev/sda5 / 16GB <- this is where I want to put Fedora; it used to be
elementary's /
Is this a plain partition, or is it an LVM physical volume?
I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then,
having
16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
crashed out with a series of Python errors.
The installer doesn't change anything on disk, including formatting, until after you
click Begin Installation. When did the crash occur? While you were in Manual Partitioning
or once you clicked on Begin Installation?
Even when the installer crashes, the automatic bug reporter rarely hangs also. Even if
that happens, you can use control-alt-F2 to get to a shell, and copy the contents of /tmp
to a USB stick. Or you can use the fpaste <filename> command to cause them to be
posted to the Fedora pastebin and then you can cite the URLs here.
If you can't get to a shell, that's a significant other problem that sounds like
it could be kernel related, in addition to the installer crashing.
It's a whole lot easier to get access to the installer logs if you have wired ethernet
at the time of the install since most wired ethernet connections are supported and enabled
when booted from install media. Wireless is a different story because a fair chunk of
wireless cards require proprietary firmware to function, and Fedora policy means
they're excluded.
Now it can't "see" a distro on sda5, it won't let
me choose it as an
option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
see how.
That suggests to me that possibly sda5 was an LVM physical volume, and maybe only the LV
was deleted, while the VG/PV is still intact so the sda5 partition itself isn't
considered free space yet. But this is speculation, the installer still shouldn't have
crashed.
In any case, I need to see logs, and actually it would be helpful to see the the text file
produced by Boot Info Script. You can be booted from any linux distro to run this.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/
I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
root partition.
It's not possible since Fedora 18. On Fedora 18+ it can either be embedded to the MBR
and MBR gap, or not embedded at all.
Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
this sort of scenario?
Uncertain, there isn't enough information so far. At least I'd like to see the
result from bootinfoscript, and the installer logs found in /tmp named anaconda.log,
program.log, and storage.log.
Chris Murphy