From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: Installing RH7.2 from iso images stored on fat32 partition of the hard disk, it always fails on post-installation scripts. Reproduced on 2 machines (i815/PIII/Fujitsu 40Gb/network and KT133A/Duron/Seagate 8.4Gb/no network), with any set of packages. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have a machine with one FAT32 partition to boot DOS 7.1, iso images stored on it, unpacked iso images stored on it too. 2. Boot DOS, cd \rh72\dosutils, run autoboot.bat 3. Select hda1, /rh72.iso as a source for installation, enter text mode installation. 4. Create normal partitions on free space (ext2 or ext3 900Mb or more in my case, with and without swap-partition, primary or extended partitions, or reformat old ext2 partition - no sence) 5. Select any set of pre-defined or custom packages. 6. Complete other steps, skipped here, start installation. 7. Sometimes installer aborts during package installing, but if I select minimal number of packages, it runs to the end and aborts during post- installation set-up of system. Actual Results: I got fully installed set of packages, loadable from floppy, but no config files are properly written (e.g., passwd/shadow), and lilo too. Additional info: Installation text screen is garbaged with diagnostic messages starting with "got signal 11... exited abnormally... then unmount of all drives... you can safely reboot" and it stops. Virtual consoles switching works, I see four-six diagnostic messages "Decompression error..." and hex codes. 1.Iso images are good (md5sum check ok) 2.Both machines are good with (u)dma, under linux too. 3.Images unpacked with loop device and "old" linux (RH7.0, Mandrake 8.1) 4.Use of the SAME procedure for "Upgrade" from previously installed RH7.0 (7.0 installed from CD, with minimal set of rpms) is SUCCESSFUL. 5.Installation from bootable CDs, burned from THESE images is SUCCESSFUL. Other problems were encountered during the installation, but they were avoided, but this could not.
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/