Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 112898
Bad Yarrow Installation rpmdb fatal region error
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:35 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: When I try to install Fedora Core 1 - [ Yarrow ] using iso CD downloaded from Fedora main servers and tested by md5sum, I get a rpmdb: fatal region error on almost every package that I install and when I reboot the pc the grub can't locate the vmlinuz file. I boot with a Knoppix CD and check the /boot directory and saw that there wasn't vmlinuz or initrd files. I try to install on ext3 and ext2 filesystem and get the same result. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot with Fedora Core Yarrow 2.Custom installation using DiskDruid 3.Proced to install 4.See tty1 to see error messages Additional info:
Does booting with 'linux allowcddma' work any better?
The exactely same problem happened to me. Looking at the intallation logs, I found out that tar-1.13.25-12.i386.rpm was somehow damaging the rpm database. I tryed at least 10 times, with different partition schemes, instalation types, and even a network (NFS) instalation, and was always at this file that the database got corrupted. All my CDs were md5sum-checked, tested, and all rpm signatures were verified. Memtest86 didn't find any problem. I didn't believed that was a hardware problem, since this computer was being used until today morning with other linux versions without any problem. I decided to do a BIOS upgrade, and the problem simply vanished. My motherboard is an ASUS P4T Socket423 running a P4 at 1.4GHz. The old BIOS revision 1005 was upgraded to revision 1007. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-November/msg00993.html states the same problem with a similar motherboard. Maybe it is a good idea to add a note on release notes of future releases, explaining that Fedora might fail in some ASUS motherboards without the lastest BIOS upgrade. Regards.
Created attachment 98603 [details] Log file of idential failure. (same error on .tar file.) I have received the same error on every attempt I have made to install FC 1, both from CD and FTP installs. Custom and standard seem to fail. The end result is that most packages don't install, including the Kernel, which means the system fails a reboot. Interestingly, the system is also a P4 1.45 GHz, although I'm sure that's coincidence...
This seems to not be a problem in newer releases of Fedora Core.
Bug 141084 claims to be the (re)appearance of this bug in FC2 and FC3, for what that's worth...