On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:58 AM, Liam Proven <lpro...@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

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