Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 408071
Anaconda crash (exception thrown) when trying to install.
Last modified: 2007-12-18 13:54:27 EST
Description of problem: Anaconda crash (exception thrown) when trying to install from DVD. It lets you get to the "I'm about to install the packages" stage, when it displays an exception caught message. Errstr is "Error running swapoff: Cannot allocate memory". Command is swapoff. I tried to save to remote, but the dialog has now hung with no info what happened, other than no file created. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora 8 DVD (verified contents) installing onto Athlon x84_64 system. I'm using the vnc method of driving it. Memory = 512MB. There is a swap partition on the HD. Local video (other than vnc) is a Matrox Millenium PCI card (the machine is a server). I'm install-upgrading it from FC4, so have told install to reformat /, /var, /boot and keep 3 other partitions, one of which is swap. I've had this error whether or not I've told it to reformat the swap partition (3 times tried so far). How reproducible: Try to "Install" system! Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot 2. Setup VNC 3. Select packages 4. Crash Actual results: Crash Expected results: Install proceeds!
Can you attach the traceback you received?
Sorry, I can't. As I noted, the "save to remove" button caused the whole installer to freeze, and all I could do was reset and start again. After that happened I would have hand-copied it, but of course the frozen UI had obscured almost all the info :-( I did successfully install: the next run, I did the install on a local display rather than via vnc, I didn't attempt to customise the install, and I used fdisk and mkswap to reformat the drives before letting anaconda loose. I suspect, but of course don't know, that the important change was in not trying to customise the install. As a side-point, I noted that when installing using vnc, the radio-buttons for customise were overlain by the Release notes button.
Closing since we are unable to speculate or reproduce for now. Feel free to reopen this bug report if you have extra information in the future. Thanks.