unable to install FC6

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

Looks like most of you are already enjoying FC6, but there's no joy here. I downloaded the ISO's and went to do a "standard" clean install and had no luck.

I've been dual booting this same computer (two hard drives, hdc and hdd) since I was running RH8/RH9 on it. Since then I've always installed newer versions over the older versions. Up until yesterday, it was running FC4/FC5.

I had FC4 installed on hdd and went to install FC6 over it. I told it to install grub in the hdc mbr. The install seemed to go perfectly until it was time for the firstboot. When it booted, I got the old FC5 grub screen and the options were only for FC4 and FC5.

I didn't think too much of that problem and just mounted the other hard drive with the
"# mount /dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00 /mnt" command, expecting that grub had choked a bit and that I could go to /etc/grub.conf, copy the entries to my grub.conf on hdc and all would be well. But the grub.conf was just a broken symlink. I then went to /mnt/boot and it was empty! No kernel... no grub... frigging nothing!

Even though all my media passed the media check and I got no errors on the install, I figured that something had barfed somewhere, so I reinstalled and this time told grub to install on hdd. The install completed with exactly the same problems. Because I'm stupid, I tried again for good measure again asking the installer to put grub on the hdc mbr. Same result.

Like I said earlier, I've been doing the same type of install for years and have never had a problem like this. All the other directories and files seem to be there, just an empty /boot with no kernel and no grub. Also I was able to see the installer saying that it was installing the kernel and installing grub. But it lies

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks in advence,

Jim

[Void Main]

That's very interesting. The only thing that looks out of the ordinary to me is that your only hard drives are on the secondary IDE controller instead of the primary which shouldn't be an issue, unless there is some sort of new bug where it becomes an issue. Have you searched bugzilla?

[dishawjp]

Voidmain,

Thanks for the reply. It's been a busy weekend for things other than Linux but I *may* have found my problem. To see if the probelm was just with FC6 I tried installing SLED 10 on hdd and had more problems. That attempted install enede up hosing grub to where nothing would boot. I tried running grub-install to see if I could at least get my FC5 to boot, but finally just used the rescue disc to mount my FC5 partition, tar up my data files and save them to a usb thumb drive. I had to let some less important stuff go since I only had a 1 GB thumb drive but got all the important stuff.

I then installed FC6 on hdc with no problems and am running that now. I ran smartctl on hdd and found some errors. It looks like this may be a hardware issue and not related to FC6.

I'll be buying another hard drive sometime this week and will probably install it next weekend. Then I'll be able to try a few more things just to confirm that this is a hardware issue. Once I find out for sure, I will post and share the outcome with the list.

Thanks again for your assistance.

Jim

[JoeDude]

I can't even get that far

Just for giggles, the one I just upgraded to FC5, I decided why not go for FC6? I'm not using it as a server anymore so it just sits there as a trial and error, monkey around with system. I was doing the online upgrade, which was going smoothly, when I got a no more mirrors to try warning...no problem, wait a bit, try again...same error. I slept on it, tried again...same error. Ok the, ISO time. Downloaded the ISO, went to burn it...baker went through the motons, but didn't burn it. Tried again, same again...reboot...why not? Same again...welllllllllllllllll, now what do I do, I know the dvd burner works right, I just made my FC5 dvd and it works fine...only the FC6-i386.iso is doing it...the Zod...is that commander zod? Anyway, I'm at work now and just trying to figure out what's happening...

[Void Main]

I have burned both the DVD and the CDs for FC6 and installed from both. Did you verify the images were good with an sha1sum?

[JoeDude]

yeah, sha1sum was perfect. The dvd's checked out as well...

it's really weird. Normally (in Ubuntu) all I do is right click on the iso and then click burn to disc, and it's done...it worked on the ubuntu, FC4, FC5 and DSL disks...I have no idea why it's not working on the FC6 dvd.

[Void Main]

That is weird because that's exactly how I burned mine.

[JoeDude]

It could be a permissions issue. Initially, I transferred the iso through samba from the FC5 station to my Ubuntu station. Then I tried to burn it by that method. Everything seemed to go fine. When it was finished, I threw it in the dvd drive of the FC5 station and it kept trying to read it then kicked it out. I looked at the disk and noticed it looked clean. So I stuck it in my Ubuntu station and noticed it was coming up as a blank DVD. I checked the permissions on the iso and it was locked and I only had read straigt down the line. I did a chmod -rwx and that didn't seem to help. Same thing happened on that dvd and a new blank one... Tonights a new night, I'll try again.


EDIT:
Good news, it seemed to work this time. I now have a shiny new FC6 DVD. BTW, This is the exact error I was getting for the online upgrade.

Code: Select all

--> Downloading header for ppp to pack into transaction set.
http://zeniiia.linux.org.uk/pub/distributions/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/ppp-2.4.4-1.i386.rpm: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:28:42 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.53 (Fedora)
Content-Length: 362
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Trying other mirror.
Error: failure: Fedora/RPMS/ppp-2.4.4-1.i386.rpm from core: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.


Really really weird now. So I checked and rechecked the dvd in Ubuntu, it's fine. I put it in the FC5 system, reboot works great. Go straight to text install, select language and keyboard, tells me I'll have to settle for text based install, ok, looks for previous edition of FC, freezes... Whaddup? Reboot thinking it might be some prob with DVD drive, nope, same again. Remove DVD, reboot. Put DVD in. I do not have permission...wait, I logged in as root! Check DVD, in Ubuntu again, check permissions, owner is root...hmmmmm...put back in FC5 machine I do not have permission to open the thing...WHYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!

[Void Main]

That's good news. Regarding the upgrade error. The ppp file is definitely not where it's looking for it and it is definitely on my DVD so there is a problem with that repo. I tell you what I do. I have a machine with the DVD image mounted and accessible via Apache. I just point the baseurl to there in my fedora-core.repo file. The bonus is the upgrade goes much faster than over the internet. I can also upgrade the machine while using it and only have to reboot when finished to bootstrap the new kernel. That's how I upgraded the voidmain web server.

Regarding it freezing while looking for another installation I am not sure. I'll check bugzilla but in the mean time have you tried switching to the other virtual consoles while it was trying to search for another installation? To do that just press "ALT+F?" where ? is 1-6. You get different messages on each console while installing. Also, what kind of hard drive do you have? IDE?

[JoeDude]

I'll try that, except through Samba, let's see what happens. Thax for the advice...I can't believe I didn't think of that...DUH!

No, I haven't tried switching consoles. I never checked what level it was on, it was in text mode...never thought of it really. It's an IDE.

I've changed the base URL: it still seems to be getting the packages from online though...hmmm. Do I need to change the mirrors as well?

I should probably wait until it get's to ppp though...that is the offending package...

yup, it was still getting them from http://zeniiia.linux.org.uk/pub/distrib ... 1.i386.rpm

I'm going to bed...I'll work more on this tomorrow, have to be up in 5 and 1/2 hours.

[Void Main]

Without seeing your fedora-core.repo and nowing how you have your DVD mounted it's hard to know if what you have is right nor not. My guess is your local baseurl isn't right and it's going to the mirrors.

[JoeDude]

ok,

[core]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=smb://joey-desktop/linux/media/cdrom0
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=core-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

[core-debuginfo]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Debug
#baseurl=smb://joey-desktop/linux/media/cdrom0
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=core-debug-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

[core-source]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Source
#baseurl=smb://joey-desktop/linux/media/cdrom0
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=core-source-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

The dvd is mounted in "/media/cdrom0", the dvd drive (cdrom0? Is that right, shouldn't it be identified as a dvd drive? I doubt it matters, it plays and burns dvds fine.)

[dishawjp]

My situation has gone from bad to worse. I'm stuck in some sort of a dual boot hell

I bought a new hard drive, 80 GB was the smallest I could get and that's a lot bigger than I need, so I figured I'd fdisk it to create a backup partition (40 GB) and another partition to install a distro on. Since my hdd was going bad, I first installed that drive as hdd and had partitions hdd1 and hdd2. I already had FC6 installed on hdc and everything seemed to be fine. So I then went to install FC5 on hdd1. the install seemed to go fine until it was time for firstboot. Grub was hosed again! No booting without the rescue CD. My hdc grub.conf was unchanged (as expected since I wanted to put the new grub on the root of hdd. But the MBR must have gotten hosed and I hadn't backed that up. And wth was grub even messing with my MBR for when I told it to install on hdd1 !?!?!

So I reinstalled FC6 on hdc, but that time, even though I told it to install on hdc only, and it told me that it would only mess with hdc, it must have somehow decided that hdd belonged to it as well. All files are installed on hdc and there are no logical volume or volume groups on hdd, but it tells me that hdd is mounted (it's not) and I can't access that drive at all now. I was able to run fdisk on hdd to remove the /boot partition that FC5 had put on it, but it's unmountable. I get an error message saying "drive already mounted or mount is busy." Neither is true and there is no fstab entry for hdd at all.

I've had my share of Linux problems as you all know, but I've never had the troubles I'm having now with FC6

I'll try again but will use dd to back up the MBR, but this is really crazy. Either that or I am.

Jim

[Void Main]

#baseurl=smb://joey-desktop/linux/media/cdrom0

It's not going to work when it's commented out. :) Remove the #. In fact put the # in front of the mirrorlist and you can be sure it won't go to any mirrors for the core repo.

[Void Main]

I'll try again but will use dd to back up the MBR, but this is really crazy. Either that or I am.

Hmmm, it sounds like you are making things a lot harder than they have to be. For instance, you don't have to reinstall the OS just to change the grub configuration or to install it on the MBR (boot from rescue disk or disk 1 install disk, mount the partitions, chroot and "grub-install /dev/deviceyouwanttoinstallgrubon" after making sure your grub.conf is correct). However, I can't be certainly without knowing more specifics, like actually seeing your parition tables (fdisk -l /dev/hdc, fdisk -l /dev/hdd), your grub.conf, your fstab, etc. I suspect some of your trouble might actually be in the fstab and in the grub.conf. For instance, if you use the "root=LABEL=/" syntax for your kernel command line in grub.conf and you have a partition on each drive with a file system label of "/" things could get confused. Same applies if you use that syntax in your fstab. What I usually do in this case is switch to using the real device names instead of using labels.