RANT . Very poor install experience. 10 hours and just got it working.

[Robin Laing]

I waited until I had calmed down and edited this post.  Originally it 
was written on Sunday April 12.

This is a rant and there are bug reports due to my issues.  Some are 
automatic from the install issues and others created or to be created by me.

I have been working on this laptop all weekend but all the re-install 
issues are from today(Sunday).

Laptop that was running F21 with a dual boot.  All of a sudden Fedora 
wouldn't boot.  Three kernels in the grub list but none would boot.  For 
some reason, the /boot/efi partition couldn't be mounted when booting 
into Fedora.  It could be related to the bug I reported about not being 
able to mount vfat partitions from rescue mode.

Grub would let me boot into rescue mode but then it wouldn't allow me to 
mount vfat partitions.  I submitted a bug on this.
   Bug 1210551

Since that time, I have tried to re-install F21 onto the system.  We 
prefer KDE so I downloaded the KDE spin and tried that.  Multiple 
attempts with failures in each case.  I will be submitting a bug 
report(s) on the issues.  I have pictures to show that the install was 
stuck but still telling me that the install was complete.

Downloaded the normal 64 bit workstation install image, and tried that. 
  Two failures at least and one automatic bug created on the second 
crash.  First crash just froze the machine.
    Bug 1158975

In all cases, it looks like the issue is related to partitioning the 
drive.  As this is a dual boot with Windows 8.1 secure boot (worked 
before F20 to F21 using fedup) I was not expecting any issues as F21 as 
it is better and ran better on this machine than F20.

Due to the windows install, the drive has partitions that are windows 
related and cannot be moved or are hidden.  Thus have to be worked 
around.  The Linux partitions are in the middle of the Windows partitions.

Second, I hate LVM.  Have lost data in the past due to LVM so I won't 
use it again unless I need to have the flexibility of LVM.  EXT4 all the 
way.

I wanted to use the present partitions so I just tried to use them again 
as I have in the past.  The Installer didn't recognize them as being an 
installed version.  In the past, the installer would ask if I wanted to 
repair the installed version of Linux.  No joy.  I tried to delete the 
partitions with the installer partition program and reformat them using 
the partition program.  This is where it seemed to freeze on multiple 
attempts.  I have a photo of the screen showing that two partitions are 
assigned the same number.  It will be in the bug report.  This happened 
with both the KDE and the Gnome installs so it is related to both 
installers.

I feel that the installer needs to be more like gparted so you can use 
all the space.  I now have blank spaces due to the installer 
partitioning program.

In the one case where the Gnome workstation install reported that it was 
complete, the reboot grub menu still had the old kernels from the 
previous install which wouldn't work.

I ended up using a live install to delete the partitions, and create a 
BTFS partition with the blank space to ensure there was nothing there 
using gparted (yum install in the live image).  Removed the EFI/fedora 
directories from the system and then tried to install again with the KDE 
live.  Failure!.  One failure with the Gnome installer.  The second 
attempt with the Gnome install finally worked and is now updating. Hours 
yet to get it up and configured for tomorrow morning for my son's school 
day.  Install KDE, KVM, and applications etc.  Configure the system by 
morning.  It is going to be a late night.

At least his user directory is still there one of the partitions that I 
didn't want to delete.  Data was backed up to a USB stick just in case.

Yes, I am frustrated as I have said to many that Fedora is easy to 
install and I am not drunk enough to not care.  :)  Now to submit bug 
reports.

Robin