Bug 1044537 - Cannot boot installer from USB key on PowerMac G5
Summary: Cannot boot installer from USB key on PowerMac G5
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED EOL
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: dracut
Version: 20
Hardware: ppc64
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: dracut-maint-list
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2013-12-18 14:01 UTC by Julio Merino
Modified: 2015-06-29 13:35 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-06-29 13:35:15 UTC
Type: Bug


Attachments (Terms of Use)
rdsosreport after installer boot failure (71.89 KB, text/plain)
2013-12-20 03:24 UTC, Julio Merino
no flags Details
rdsosreport after passing root=LABEL=... with debug (160.23 KB, text/plain)
2013-12-20 14:07 UTC, Julio Merino
no flags Details

Description Julio Merino 2013-12-18 14:01:38 UTC
[ Filing under dracut because that's the last thing I get from the boot process... but the component may be wrong. ]

With the switch to Grub in F20 for PPC, I thought getting the installer to boot properly off of a USB key on a PowerMac G5 would finally work properly.  In fact, the process gets a bit further along than with F19 (no problems loading the kernel), but still fails when trying to mount the root file system.

I booted the installer from OpenFirmware like this:

boot /ht@0,f2000000/pci@4/usb@b/disk@2:2,\boot\grub\powerpc-ieee1275\core.elf

and the boot process failed at this point:

[  OK  ] Reached target Basic System.
dracut-initqueue[499]: mount: no medium found on /dev/sr0
dracut-initqueue[499]: Warning: Couldn't mount /dev/sr0
dracut-initqueue[499]: Warning: no suitable images

"diskutil list" on Mac OS X shows the following:

/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *1.0 GB     disk2
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         1.0 KB     disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS 20-Beta                 349.0 MB   disk2s2

(This is after DDing the netboot ISO onto the USB drive given that my attempts at using the liveusb-creator or unetbootin from F20 on an amd64 laptop didn't work at all.)

I tried passing root=/dev/sdb1 to the kernel from Grub but that didn't work much better -- but I got dropped to the emergency shell from which I could probably gather some useful information if necessary.

If you have any hints as to how to get further data please let me know and I can try them.

Thanks.

Comment 1 Harald Hoyer 2013-12-19 15:23:55 UTC
Booting from the stick should give you a shell. Can you mount any partition on the stick and save /run/initramfs/rdsosreport.txt ?

If not, can you take a photo of the first page of this file?

# less /run/initramfs/rdsosreport.txt

Comment 2 Julio Merino 2013-12-19 15:34:11 UTC
Booting "as is" does not give me a shell.  The process gets stuck as described above.  So maybe that's a separate bug?

That said, if I pass root=/dev/sdb1 (or sdc1) I get to the emergency shell.  Will post the contents of the file later from home.

Comment 3 Julio Merino 2013-12-20 03:24:30 UTC
Created attachment 839319 [details]
rdsosreport after installer boot failure

Here comes the requested rdsosreport.txt after forcing the installer to abort and drop me to a shell by giving it an invalid value of root=

Comment 4 Harald Hoyer 2013-12-20 10:50:41 UTC
(In reply to Julio Merino from comment #3)
> Created attachment 839319 [details]
> rdsosreport after installer boot failure
> 
> Here comes the requested rdsosreport.txt after forcing the installer to
> abort and drop me to a shell by giving it an invalid value of root=

/dev/sdc1: UUID="2013-11-07-16-06-31-00" LABEL="Fedora_20_Beta_ppc64" TYPE="iso9660" PTTYPE="dos" 

so, "root=LABEL=Fedora_20_Beta_ppc64" should work

you might want to add "debug" to the end of the kernel command line

Comment 5 Julio Merino 2013-12-20 14:07:44 UTC
Created attachment 839574 [details]
rdsosreport after passing root=LABEL=... with debug

As I suspected... that didn't work either.  I had already tried passing root=/dev/sdc1 which didn't work.

This time, I also gave 'debug' along with the root=LABEL=... parameter as you suggested and attached a new rdsosreport.txt file with the new contents.

Note, in particular, this line:

[   32.470593] localhost dracut-pre-pivot[541]: ln: failed to create symbolic link '/sysroot/boot/initramfs-3.11.6-301.fc20.ppc64.img': Read-only file system

I mounted the HFS file system on OS X and, indeed, it is read only and has 0 bytes free -- plus there is the 'ro' line passed to the kernel.  That said, I guess that's a red herring because I would expect the root file system to be read only: had I recorded the image to a CD, it'd have been read-only.

Comment 6 Harald Hoyer 2014-01-07 12:55:20 UTC
root=LABEL=Fedora_20_Beta_ppc64

This is wrong for an installer image.

It has to be:

root=live:LABEL=Fedora_20_Beta_ppc64

Comment 7 Julio Merino 2014-01-22 21:13:48 UTC
The installation documentation says that writing a Fedora ISO to a USB key is a supported mechanism.  But when doing so on this machine, the installer fails to boot.  So yes, this is a bug.  I should not have to specify any root= argument by hand at all.

(I still have to give a try to your updated suggestion above but was on vacations; sorry for the delay.  Will try sometime this week.)

Comment 8 Julio Merino 2014-01-24 14:13:25 UTC
Bleh.  So booting the final, non-beta Fedora 20 installer (with or without the root= flag) results in a complete hang.  I think it's happening right before the kernel attempts to start init, but I need to look in more detail...

Comment 9 Julio Merino 2014-09-08 11:48:24 UTC
I think the failures were pretty clearly identified and they are obviously a bug: the documentation says the installation should work from a USB key, but then it doesn't.

That said, I don't care about tracking this any longer so do as you please with the bug.

Comment 10 Fedora End Of Life 2015-05-29 10:01:45 UTC
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Comment 11 Fedora End Of Life 2015-06-29 13:35:15 UTC
Fedora 20 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2015-06-23. Fedora 20 is
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