Bug 55965

Can you attach a debug error message that should have been created when the
install crashed?  I don't have much to go on without that.

As for installer, it doesn't produce a message about debug-log.
I'll try to repeat this procedure another time to see if there is a log or to 
copy on-screen messages manually, but it can take some days.

I've repeated this on i815/PIII/Fujitsu 40Gb.
I filled all the installation screens quickly, removed all the packages except minimal 
necessary set... And installation proceeds to the end! First time out of ten! The only 
difference was: this time I didn't install any bootloader...
Well, I repeat this another time, but set "check / partition for bad blocks". And I got:
vc/1:
Checking for bad blocks (in Russian)
install exited abnormally -- recieved signal 11      sending termination signals... done   
sending kill signals... done   disabling swap...  unmounting filesystems   /mnt/runtime done   
 disabling /dev/loop1   /proc done   /dev/pts done   /tmp/ramfs done   you may safely 
reboot your system

vc/2:
#

vc/3:
[many informational messages, last is:]
* hda5 is a protected partition
[I had images on hda5]

vc/4:
[many times repeated]
<6> attempt to access beyond end of device
<6> 01:01: rw=0, want=4846, limit=4608
<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c026b2a3(2652) -> ccef3000(4096)
<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c026bcff(2525) -> ccec7000(4096)
<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c026c6dc(2395) -> cceba000(4096)
<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c026d037(2594) -> cceb1000(4096)

vc/5:
Checking for bad blocks in read-only mode:
...
...: 2097152 / 7020373

I repeat this third time. Difference: don't check for bad blocks, but install a bunch of 
packages, and lilo.
Installtion aborts very nearly from the end. Some message blinked (may be, "unable to 
load shared library", but I'm not shure), but was cleared by consequent output, visible rest 
was:
                 r/sbin/probe: error
                 file data: Error 21
install exited abnormally -- recieved signal 11 ...
... and so on

vc/2:
#

vc/3:
[all the same, but additional lines:]
* Mount of /proc/bus/usb failed
* Writing main configuration
* self.hostname =cathost

vc/4:
<6> attempt to access beyond end of device
<6> 01:01: rw=0, want=4846, limit=4608
<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c02674d9(2370) -> d7b81000(4096)
<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c0267e1b(2122) -> c854f000(4096)

The last messages was not there while installing packages, they appeared only at 
moment of error.

All this seems to me as kernel or hardware disk i/o errors, but completely the same was 
happend on completely different system (see first message), and simple tests of disk 
subsystem (mke2fs with bad block testing, copying the large amount of data from partition 
to partition) doesn't reveal any hardware errors or incompatibilities.

I'm going to change the component of this report to the kernel to see if they
can make sense of the errors you are seeing.

I'm seeing something like this as well.  My best guess is that the ramdisk is
getting corrupted, as I'm seeing things like:

<6>attempt to access beyond end of device
<6>01:01 rw=1, want=XXXX, limit=4608

01:01 is /dev/ram1.

One interesting thing is that after these messages appear, I can't do much from
VT2 except run shell builtins:

ls: error while loading shared libraries: /lib/libc.so.6: cannot read file data:
Error 21

Indeed, libc is trashed.  But this works fine during the installation process
and only croaks some time durin or shortly after all of the packages have
installed.  Fortunately GRUB installs and %post gets run in its entirely
(probably because it's all running from the newly installed system and not from
the corrupted ramdisk) so I'm better off than the original reporter.

My 7.2 installation is slightly tweaked; I'm doing an HTTP install, everything
has been copied to one tree, all errata have been applied, KDE has been upgraded
to 2.2.2 and a couple of custom packages have been added.  pkgorder and
genhdlist have been run.  But this shouldn't matter, because the system seems to
install fine.

Hardware:

1.4GHz Athlon on Asus A7V-133 motherboard, 768MB of Kingston PC133 SDRAM (tested
with memtest86 overnight, no problems).  Intel eepro100 Ethernet, IBM 60GXP
disk, NVidia GF2Ultra graphics card.

It seems I'm having the same problem.  I've verified checksums on the disc-1 and
disc-2 .isos that I've downloaded, and am installing via PXE (using initrd.img
and vmlinuz from images/pxeboot).  Contents of the .isos are copied to the
NFS server.

Under %packages in my ks.cfg file, I've specified "@ Everything".  Near the end
of the installation, I get a few of the

<4> Error -3 while decompressing!
<4>c....(..) -> c....(..)

messages, and eventually the install catches a sig11 and terminates.

The install system is a Dell 1550 1U server, 933 MHz P-III, 1G RAM, 9G disk.  I
have seen the same problem on two identical known good boxes.

Note that after I see the first of the "Error -3 while decompressing!"
messages, commands like ls, df, pwd fail (command not found, or hangs).  Also, I
do _not_ see an "attempt to access beyond end of device" message.

The errors are the same regardless of whether I mount an update image at
RHupdates or not.

Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of
the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem
persists.

The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, 
and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in
the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/