From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: Actually two pretty reproducible problems: (i) Anaconda gives an error trying to install mailcap and prompts for a <return> to try again. After several <returns> installation proceeds; (ii) The fatal error (unhandled exception) occurs towards the end of CD 1, when trying to install texet-fonts. I know this isn't a new bug. I've looked through the Anaconda buglists for both 7.2 and 7.3 and this "(16, 'Device or resource busy')" error crops up again and again, and very often (with 7.2 at any rate) it happens at the same point, i.e. when installing tetex-fonts (the 'favourite' with 7.3 seems to be openjade). And in every bug report, it's ascribed to 'bad CD', 'bad media', 'faulty CD drive' etc. by the RH folk. But...it's not that easy to dismiss the problem as due to bad media or faulty CD drives. This bug is happening again and again to people with CDs and CD drives that function perfectly normally in other situations. It seems to me that the problem lies with Anaconda in that it appears to handle CD read problems in an ungraceful and intolerant way. The fact that the problem often seems to occur at the same point in the installation on diverse systems might suggest that there are particular 'challenges' posed to the hardware or software at this point and might provide some clues to solving the problem; it also gives the lie to the suggestion that random CD or CD-drive errors are at the root of things. Before I fork out (the admittedly very reasonable) fee for 8.0 and try again, can you tell me whether the version of Anaconda in 8.0 has been reinforced to make it more robust in the face of these CD read problems? Or are there other tweaks that can be applied to the system (e.g. in the BIOS) to reduce their impact? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot from pcmcia and pcmciadd floppies 2.Run installer (gui or text) from bought CDs 3.Watch the crash for the nth time Actual Results: No Linux Expected Results: Working Linux Additional info: Toshiba Portege 3480CT 192MB RAM Targus PA950 PC card 24x CD-ROM USB floppy & mouse RH7.2 Professional boxed media that have been successfully installed on some other systems here.
Created attachment 79205 [details] Anaconda dump file
One cause is faulty media, another is a place where we weren't correctly closing a file before retrying. These problems have been fixed in Red Hat Linux 8.0 (although we recently uncovered another bug there (#75377) which I'm hoping to have a fix for today)
OK, thanks -- I'll look forward to trying 8.0.