On 24 March 2014 16:37, Chris Murphy <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:58 AM, Liam Proven <lproven@xxxxxxxxx> 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: lproven@xxxxxxxxx * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven@xxxxxxxxxxx * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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
