Description of problem: Unable to smoothly install fedora 8 test 3 on a Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop. First attempt failed while formatting partitions. Second attempt seemed to work but with error dialogs, and grub no longer showed the other (windows) partition after the install. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora 8 test 3 live x386 CD (7.92) How reproducible: Not clear; failed unexpectedly in different ways on two successive attempts Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot from fedora 8 live CD 2. Double click install icon to install 3. Actual results: First try: Computer froze at the point it was formatting the disks. The last dialog on the screen seemed to show it was formatting the / partition. Second try: The install seemed to work, but as it was starting to copy the live image to disk, a dialog box appeared with the message (paraphrased) "cannot mount volume /boot; Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.InterfaceLocked". In spite of this the data still was copied to the hard disk, and the I was able to reboot into fedora after the install finished. But: this is a dual-boot machine and after installing the test3 live CD, grub only showed the fedora partition in it's list. (The windows partition is most likely still there, since the fedora install only used as much of the disk as the fedora 7 system it was replacing, but I haven't verified that yet.) Expected results: Normal install, with both fedora and windows partitions available as selections in grub. Additional info:
The dialog and vista not being set up in the bootloader are being tracked in separate bugs. When it failed while formatting, did the machine reboot, hard hang, or give a traeback?
The freeze while formatting was a hard hang - no reboot, traceback, or anything else. I had to power- cycle the machine manually to recover. (And on the other bug, the boot partition is XP, not vista, but it's probably the same issue either way. I did confirm that the XP partition was intact in spite of not showing up in the boot menu.)
Sorry, that should be "the other partition is XP", not "the boot partition is XP". Either way, it's still there.
The freeze is probably kernel related -- how much RAM do you have in your system?
384MB - not huge, but well above the fedora 8 minimum, I think. Other hardware includes a 650MHz pentium III and about 11GB of available disk space for the fedora partitions.
I suspect that you were just running out of memory. The live image keeps all changes to the system in a RAM-based overlay -- helpful, as you can then have a read/write filesystem. Unfortunate as it takes up memory. And especially as you're running without swap (as we need to be able to entirely repartition), the memory requirements will often be a little bit higher. The second time probably worked as you had done less on the system before kicking off the installation.
I'm sure that's possible, but if so, there's very little headroom. The first time around, I probably didn't do much more before attempting to install than launch firefox to see if I had a live net connection. The second time I did run the installer as the first thing after the boot. Not sure what to suggest other than it would be better if it could fail more gracefully, or maybe abandon the existing changes in RAM with the user's permission if they're only using the live CD to do an installation. (For an old machine like this, I'd actually be happy if there were a way to just run an installer from a CD without necessarily starting a live image. Unfortunately, this machine has trouble booting from a >2GB disk, so I haven't been able to successfully use the DVD image to install.)