Bug 51516

Summary: install fails
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Chris Ricker <chris.ricker>
Component: anacondaAssignee: Matt Wilson <msw>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME QA Contact: Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: 7.3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2001-08-15 19:18:42 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Chris Ricker 2001-08-11 14:59:05 UTC
I have a test box that I tried to install beta3 on.  I told the installer
(GUI) to wipe the whole thing and set up two ext3 filesystems:

/boot (hda1 25 megs)
swap  (hda2 256 megs)
/     (hda3 rest)

(it picked the partition numbers and primary versus logical, I didn't).  It
mkfs'ed /tmp/hda1 only.

Install proceeded as far as the transfer image stage, when it reported

"An error occured transferring the install image to yoru hard drive.  You
are probably out of disk space."

No error messages appear on any of the VCs, and the filesystems appear to
have been created.  Initially, none of the filesystems were mounted by the
installer.

When I hit okay, and tried again, /boot (/tmp/hda1) got mounted as
/mnt/sysimage and so the same error occurred.

What the installer should do is mount /tmp/hda3 as /mnt/sysimage and
/tmp/hda1 as /mnt/sysimage/boot.  When I try doing that manually, /tmp/hda3
won't mount.

If I then manually mke2fs -j /tmp/hda3, it will mount.

If I then tell the installer to proceed, it re-mkfs'es /tmp/hda1 only, and
then mounts it on /mnt/sysimage on top of /tmp/hda3.

Something is seriously borked here.  The installer is apparently confusing
/ and /boot?

Comment 1 Matt Wilson 2001-08-11 18:20:07 UTC
I wonder why the installer failed to transfer the stage2 image the first time.


Comment 2 Chris Ricker 2001-08-11 18:23:51 UTC
I think it failed the first time because it was creating /dev and such inside of
/boot (25 meg slice) that mistakenly got mounted as /.

I think the real question is why it failed to mkfs the real "/" slice, since all
the other breakage stemmed from that....

Comment 3 Matt Wilson 2001-08-11 18:35:50 UTC
can you reproduce readily?  In text mode too?


Comment 4 Chris Ricker 2001-08-11 18:49:32 UTC
It's no longer reproducible, because I mkfs'ed (ext3) the / partition by hand. 
When I did that, the same install session would still fail but rebooting and
then starting the install over worked.

Just guessing, but I think the problem may have been caused by the initial
partition table being extremely complex.  That machine's a total test bed, so it
had darn near every conceivable PC operating system on it....
You may have to close this as a heisenbug, but there's something fragile in the
logic anaconda uses to determine which partitions to mkfs and such.

Comment 5 Glen Foster 2001-08-13 19:10:15 UTC
This defect is considered SHOULD-FIX for Fairfax.

Comment 6 Matt Wilson 2001-08-15 17:13:06 UTC
during your partitioning run, did you ever have an allocation fail?  That is,
when adding partitions did the message, "Could not allocate requested
partitions: (some reason)"?


Comment 7 Chris Ricker 2001-08-15 17:15:27 UTC
Nope

Comment 8 Matt Wilson 2001-08-15 19:18:38 UTC
I can't reproduce this failure.


Comment 9 Matt Wilson 2001-08-17 19:45:35 UTC
I wish I could reproduce this, but since the test case is gone it's going to be
impossible to fix.


Comment 10 Chris Ricker 2001-08-17 19:53:17 UTC
The initial filesystem layout, before I booted the installer, was something like


Comment 11 Chris Ricker 2001-08-17 19:53:58 UTC
<sorry about that, this mozilla build is borked>


Comment 12 Chris Ricker 2001-08-17 19:56:53 UTC
Damn, you can't hit return in the text box in this mozilla build, or it submits
the page, so just deal with the really long lines....  At any rate, hda1 was
NTFS, hda2 was Solaris/x86's weird partition containing UFS slices, and then
logical partitions were ext2, ext3, reiser, FreeBSD partition containing UFS
slices, and then a BeFS.  I don't know that that had any thing to do with it,
but perhaps all the complex partitioning confused it?