On 24 March 2014 16:37, Chris Murphy <li...@colorremedies.com> wrote: > > 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?
Plain MBR partition. I never ever use LVM on anything. >> 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? The sequence went: [1] try to install to pre-existing partitions made in Gparted [2] fail; try to remove and recreate partitions [3] fail; plug in an external USB2 250GB drive, try to install to that On this 3rd go, I used the installer to remove the whole empty FAT32 partition on the USB drive. Then I told it to use all the space for the root FS, nothing else. Picked the other options I needed - UK keyboard, etc. - and clicked the button to begin installation. The screen went blank - grey background, mouse pointer, nothing else at all - and stayed that way. I could flip to vconsoles but nothing else appeared on the graphical screen. There was disk activity - it was doing /something/ at least at first - but no screen activity. I left it several hours before power-cycling the machine. I'll try again, leave it all on defaults and see if that gets further. > 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. Fair enough. Thanks for the info. I'll try this. >> 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. Nope. Plain old logical partitions in an extended partition, which was the only volume on a 1TB MBR drive. The laptop is from 2007 or so, has a plain BIOS, so a GPT disk isn't really an option. > 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. O_o That is... very surprising. >> 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. I'll see what I can do, but other projects are taking priority over this one at the moment. -- Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
