Hi!
I have been struggling installing Fedora on a friend's MBA as the local SSD doesn't seem to be recognized. I found a few posts online with various degrees of luck, unfortunately they never mentioned with MBA is used and that didn't work for me.
Does anyone has (positive?) experience on the topic?
Thank you.
Fred
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 04:41:04PM +0700, Frederic Muller wrote:
Hi!
I have been struggling installing Fedora on a friend's MBA as the local SSD doesn't seem to be recognized. I found a few posts online with various degrees of luck, unfortunately they never mentioned with MBA is used and that didn't work for me.
I'm not a Mac user, but knowing what you tried might give others some ideas what you could try.
On 07/29/2015 07:01 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 04:41:04PM +0700, Frederic Muller wrote:
Hi!
I have been struggling installing Fedora on a friend's MBA as the local SSD doesn't seem to be recognized. I found a few posts online with various degrees of luck, unfortunately they never mentioned with MBA is used and that didn't work for me.
I'm not a Mac user, but knowing what you tried might give others some ideas what you could try.
Well unfortunately there is not much thing to try as the disk is simply invisible. So I have tried a lot of web searches for one ;-) and also other distro install with even less success (screen simply didn't even display text, so I couldn't get very far - maybe that was a problem with the intel HD graphics 6000 drivers?).
And so to directly answer your question: 1. create USB key to boot from 2. Boot from EFI disk 3. Try to find the disk when ask to chose a disk to install: and here it only sees the USB key.
Thank you for the follow up.. i feel so :-/
Fred
I installed Fedora 20 on a macbook air like this:
1) burned the KDE live dvd,
2) plugged the dvd player into the mac usb port
3) held down the option button while I boot the macbook
4) when it comes up with the boot options choose the Fedora DVD (it takes a few min before it shows up)
5) boot off the DVD, then do the install to disk as normal
On 07/29/2015 06:13 AM, Frederic Muller wrote:
On 07/29/2015 07:01 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 04:41:04PM +0700, Frederic Muller wrote:
Hi!
I have been struggling installing Fedora on a friend's MBA as the local SSD doesn't seem to be recognized. I found a few posts online with various degrees of luck, unfortunately they never mentioned with MBA is used and that didn't work for me.
I'm not a Mac user, but knowing what you tried might give others some ideas what you could try.
Well unfortunately there is not much thing to try as the disk is simply invisible. So I have tried a lot of web searches for one ;-) and also other distro install with even less success (screen simply didn't even display text, so I couldn't get very far - maybe that was a problem with the intel HD graphics 6000 drivers?).
And so to directly answer your question:
- create USB key to boot from
- Boot from EFI disk
- Try to find the disk when ask to chose a disk to install: and here it
only sees the USB key.
Thank you for the follow up.. i feel so :-/
Fred
On 07/29/2015 08:07 PM, CS DBA wrote:
I installed Fedora 20 on a macbook air like this:
burned the KDE live dvd,
plugged the dvd player into the mac usb port
held down the option button while I boot the macbook
when it comes up with the boot options choose the Fedora DVD (it
takes a few min before it shows up)
- boot off the DVD, then do the install to disk as normal
Sorry if my email wasn't clear enough: there is no disk to install Fedora to. The SSD drive is simply invisible.
Fred.
On 07/29/2015 06:13 AM, Frederic Muller wrote:
On 07/29/2015 07:01 PM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 04:41:04PM +0700, Frederic Muller wrote:
Hi!
I have been struggling installing Fedora on a friend's MBA as the local SSD doesn't seem to be recognized. I found a few posts online with various degrees of luck, unfortunately they never mentioned with MBA is used and that didn't work for me.
I'm not a Mac user, but knowing what you tried might give others some ideas what you could try.
Well unfortunately there is not much thing to try as the disk is simply invisible. So I have tried a lot of web searches for one ;-) and also other distro install with even less success (screen simply didn't even display text, so I couldn't get very far - maybe that was a problem with the intel HD graphics 6000 drivers?).
And so to directly answer your question:
- create USB key to boot from
- Boot from EFI disk
- Try to find the disk when ask to chose a disk to install: and here it
only sees the USB key.
Thank you for the follow up.. i feel so :-/
Fred
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 10:07:26PM +0700, Frederic Muller wrote:
On 07/29/2015 08:07 PM, CS DBA wrote:
I installed Fedora 20 on a macbook air like this:
burned the KDE live dvd,
plugged the dvd player into the mac usb port
held down the option button while I boot the macbook
when it comes up with the boot options choose the Fedora DVD (it
takes a few min before it shows up)
- boot off the DVD, then do the install to disk as normal
Sorry if my email wasn't clear enough: there is no disk to install Fedora to. The SSD drive is simply invisible.
From a root terminal[1] in the live USB, can you see the disk with
`parted -l' or `fdisk -l'? If yes, you could format it from the command line, and then try starting the installer. Needless to say backup first. If you can't see it even with parted, then I'm afraid I don't have any thoughts how to proceed.
Footnotes:
[1] I think sudo should work, otherwise try su -, I think in a live system it is passwordless.
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:
Sorry if my email wasn't clear enough: there is no disk to install Fedora to. The SSD drive is simply invisible.
It's possible it's being misidentified and "stolen" by multipathd and will need to be explicitly blacklisted. Doing that is easy, but totally non-obvious. This might provide some assistance on configuring the blacklist: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/htm...
I think I used that or something really similar to it when I had this problem during Fedora 22 testing (which resulted in some multipathd changes, but hey there are always edge cases).
On a MBA it's difficult to get information off of it, because proprietary firmware is needed for wireless. I'm not sure if the mDP/thunderbolt to ethernet adapter needs a driver (?), but if you have one and it works out of the box then you can scp a copy of 'journalctl -b -l -o short-monotonic > journal.txt' to some other computer. Another option is two USB sticks. Another option still is to create the install media USB stick with livecd-iso-to-disk pointed at a *partition* rather than the whole stick. Pre-partition it into two partitions. Format the smaller partition as anything, mkfs.ext4 is fine so is FAT it doesn't matter. And then point l-i-t-d (part of livecd-tools package) to the other partition. While you're at it, you might as all use the --overlay-size-mb option because that's necessary to create a persistent blacklist file to be used at boot time - assuming the blacklist file is even needed.
So now you can boot the install media, and you'll have a partition you can mount to capture the journal. Post that file somewhere and we'll see if it suggests multipathd or other confusion. While you're at it, both 'lsblk' and 'blkid' output might be useful also. But really it's whether the kernel sees it, and if so how udev and/or multipathd handled it thereafter.
On 07/30/2015 01:16 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:
Sorry if my email wasn't clear enough: there is no disk to install Fedora to. The SSD drive is simply invisible.
It's possible it's being misidentified and "stolen" by multipathd and will need to be explicitly blacklisted. Doing that is easy, but totally non-obvious. This might provide some assistance on configuring the blacklist: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/htm...
I think I used that or something really similar to it when I had this problem during Fedora 22 testing (which resulted in some multipathd changes, but hey there are always edge cases).
On a MBA it's difficult to get information off of it, because proprietary firmware is needed for wireless. I'm not sure if the mDP/thunderbolt to ethernet adapter needs a driver (?), but if you have one and it works out of the box then you can scp a copy of 'journalctl -b -l -o short-monotonic > journal.txt' to some other computer. Another option is two USB sticks. Another option still is to create the install media USB stick with livecd-iso-to-disk pointed at a *partition* rather than the whole stick. Pre-partition it into two partitions. Format the smaller partition as anything, mkfs.ext4 is fine so is FAT it doesn't matter. And then point l-i-t-d (part of livecd-tools package) to the other partition. While you're at it, you might as all use the --overlay-size-mb option because that's necessary to create a persistent blacklist file to be used at boot time - assuming the blacklist file is even needed.
So now you can boot the install media, and you'll have a partition you can mount to capture the journal. Post that file somewhere and we'll see if it suggests multipathd or other confusion. While you're at it, both 'lsblk' and 'blkid' output might be useful also. But really it's whether the kernel sees it, and if so how udev and/or multipathd handled it thereafter.
Hi!
Thank you for the answers I see quite a few more things to try now ;-) . On a sidenote livecd-to-disk didn't work as the MBA didn't see the stick. dd however did work and booted. Gparted however saw a 16GB stick instead of 4GB. And yes the wifi needs proprietary drivers...
I however gave it back to my friend last night as he is leaving on holidays but really wants to go away from OSX (or Windows). He just likes that hardware. I'll get it back when he returns and will be able to have fun again.
Thank you all for the follow ups.
Fred
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:
On a sidenote livecd-to-disk didn't work as the MBA didn't see the stick. dd however did work and booted.
Those seem contradictory. The stick is a block device. In order for dd to use it, it had to show up the same as for livecd-iso-to-disk.
Gparted however saw a 16GB stick instead of 4GB.
Sounds suspiciously like counterfeit flash.
On 07/30/2015 09:00 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:
On a sidenote livecd-to-disk didn't work as the MBA didn't see the stick. dd however did work and booted.
Those seem contradictory. The stick is a block device. In order for dd to use it, it had to show up the same as for livecd-iso-to-disk.
Gparted however saw a 16GB stick instead of 4GB.
Sounds suspiciously like counterfeit flash.
So I formatted afterwards because I used the flash for something else and it showed a hpfs+ partition (using dd). I need to have a look at the livecd gparted view (which is then 4GB - but I think it is very different) but I was also very surprised by the whole stuff. Gparted stated that their was a problem with the block size (IIRC) which was 512 at one place and 2048 at another place...
Fred
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 8:15 PM, Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:
On 07/30/2015 09:00 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:
On a sidenote livecd-to-disk didn't work as the MBA didn't see the stick. dd however did work and booted.
Those seem contradictory. The stick is a block device. In order for dd to use it, it had to show up the same as for livecd-iso-to-disk.
Gparted however saw a 16GB stick instead of 4GB.
Sounds suspiciously like counterfeit flash.
So I formatted afterwards because I used the flash for something else and it showed a hpfs+ partition (using dd). I need to have a look at the livecd gparted view (which is then 4GB - but I think it is very different) but I was also very surprised by the whole stuff. Gparted stated that their was a problem with the block size (IIRC) which was 512 at one place and 2048 at another place...
Flash will report a logical sector size of 512 bytes and fib about physical sector size of 512 bytes also. Optical media has a sector size of 2048 bytes, and the ISO image contains an ISO 9660 file system so the terminology may just be getting confused between the actual flash as a physical device and the fs that's on it.
*shrug*
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Chris Murphy -
CS DBA -
Frederic Muller -
Suvayu Ali