Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 70437
Installation from ISO images on hard disk fails
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:45:05 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020722 Description of problem: Installation from ISO images downloaded to a FAT32 partition on the target hard disk failed. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Download the "limbo" ISO images to a logical FAT32 partition 2.Boot from a "boot.img" floppy 3.Push Enter in response to the first screen. 4.Select language and keyboard (en, se-latin1) 5.Select media mode (Hard drive) 6.Select the partition (hda6) and path (/) Actual Results (console messages): Running Anaconda... Probing for video card: RIVA TNT2 Probing for monitor type: Unable to probe Probing for mouse type: Generic 3-button PS/2 Graphical installation not available for hd installs. Starting text mode. Traceback (most recent calls last): /usr/bin/anaconda line 603 in ? rootPath) /usr/src/build/129715-i386/install/usr/lib/anaconda/harddrive.py line 235 in __init__ /usr/src/build/129715-i386/install/usr/lib/anaconda/image.py line 288 in findIsoImages /usr/src/build/129715-i386/install/usr/lib/anaconda/text.py line 276 in messageWindow /usr/src/build/129715-i386/install/usr/lib/anaconda/text.py line 116 in __init__ /usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/snack.py line 547 in ButtonChoiceWindow AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'height' install exited abnormally sending termination signals (more messages, finally "you may safely reboot your system") Expected Results: Continued installer dialogue. Additional info: Workaround: Use some other installation method (I went for FTP).
Did you allow the installer to media check your ISOs, and did it succeed?
I have now tried to start the installation with "linux mediacheck". When I reach the screen where I specify the ISO images location, I tried specifying a non-existent directory on the correct partition. So far so good, the installer said "Failed to read directory ... No such file or directory". Next I tried to specify the wrong partition and an existing directory. This produced the message "Device /dev/hda2 does not appear to contain Red Hat CDROM images". Also reasonable. Finally I specified the right partition and the right directory. I then got the same crash as before. For comparison I tried "linux mediacheck" on a Red Hat 7.3 box where I still have the ISO images lying around. The installer complained "Failed to read directory /mnt/source" but apart from that things went well. I also tried to create the structure /mnt/source on /dev/hda6 and move the ISO images there, but that did not help. The complaint "Failed to read directory /mnt/source" is still issued, and after that there is the check (well ... there is no report of success though), and then the screen "Welcome to Red Hat Linux". After that a normal installation dialogue sequence follows.
I have now checked the MD5 sums of the five ISO images; it turned out that no 4 is broken! It is less than 500 MB in size so there is no chance that it could be correct.
I have now downloaded the 4th ISO image and checked that its MD5 is correct. And, good news, install from hard drive now works. So, it was all a mistake on my part. The "linux mediacheck" install option is a bit disappointing in that it does not have a sanity check that catched my problem. Here is an idea; since the boot.img installer is specific to one particular Red Hat release, why not let it know about the exact sizes of the corresponding ISO images? It could then easily detect and diagnose this kind of condition. A still more ambitious check could be done if the boot.img code knows the expected MD5 sums. However, it takes a while to compute the MD5s, so an impatient user might not want to have it (though it could be part of the "linux mediacheck" option perhaps?).