Sabayon 5.3 KDE installer crash/partition problem [Solved]

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Hi all,

Glad to become a member of Sabayon community. Sabayon looks very interesting to me. I wish to try it and use it as one of my main distros. However, I seem to have problems with installation.

I was trying to install on the slave disk sdb. It was empty. I didn't want to use the whole disk, so chose to manually partition.
The problem started with well-known installer (anaconda, I think) crash after committing changes to partitions. Tried installer update and patch - nothing worked. I had to go to cfdisk to make partitions, then choose them later in the installer itself. Everything went smooth after that, in the end GRUB installed on /dev/sdb.
Now comes reboot and I am greeted with "grub rescue>"
Anyway I needed to install another distro (KXStudio), so I thought well it will install GRUB also, and hopefully pick up Sabayon. I went with install and when I was presented with partitions to choose from on /dev/sdb there were NONE. Everything was suggested as being empty. So there was no Sabayon on the disk.

I thought that by installing on the slave and then booting from it will change the /dev/ numbers from sdb to sda and that might confuse GRUB, as it happened with arch. However, no partitions whatsoever is very strange indeed.

Md5sum was ok. I couldn't check if DVD is ok or not, as calling isoinfo -d -i /dev/cdrom command in terminal from Slackware didn't give me any alphanumeric strings to compare it with the correct one. I will try again maybe from inside the Sabayon DVD live.

So, I would really like to install Sabayon, any help will be appreciated.

** People who love freedom choose Linux; for stalinists, fascists, communists and tyrants there is that other OS.**

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Sorry forgot to mention - I was using x86 version, partitions were formatted as ext4, "/" was 7000 gb, "/home" was 10000 gb and swap was 1000 gb. I have 1gb of ram, Athlon XP 2800+. On board graphic card (which is not a problem I guess as it didn't affect installer at all). Hard disk is 40 gb, quite old I guess.

Please let me know if you need more info.

[DontPanic]

The situation you describe is odd.

You can run the simple command: 'cat /proc/partitions' to confirm that the partition table for /dev/sdb is empty.

It /dev/sdb is empty, it would be a good idea to give this hard disk a workout to make sure it's not the problem.

You can use the badblocks command 'badblocks -s -n -t random /dev/sdb' to give it a good once-over.

I'm not sure if badblocks will run on an unpartitioned disk, so you may need to partition the disk again just to run badblocks.

Check 'dmesg' for I/O errors on that device.

You can run these commands from a live session on the Sabayon DVD.

[light]

Hi DontPanic,

Thank you for your help. Sorry I wasn't able to answer sooner. Had no time during weekend.

I checked DVD integrity - all fine, md5sum checked out.
Anyway, I had taken out the old hard disk and tried to install on the new one containing my Slackware 13.1. I decided to do dual-boot. However, I have tried different ways of installing Sabayon 5.3 K (x86) and failed. Booted into LiveDVD, started the installer - when I click to commit changes to hard disk (after choosing to manually create partitions) a popup comes up saying it crashed and "could be a bug". So, I installed patch - same thing, crash at exactly same place. I did liveinst-update-quick - same thing. I did liveinst-update-quick and them applied patch - same thing. I ran liveinst from Konsole with root privileges - now installer crashed even earlier. As soon as I choose which hard disk to use for installation - it crashes. Can't even go to manual partition.

I am out of ideas. Please help. Should I wait for Sabayon 5.4, maybe anaconda issues will be solved there?

** To stop rave parties at the abandoned pit outside the city, police filled up the pit with bodies of dead animals. Ravers were stopped. ~ An illustration to crime displacement theory.**

[DontPanic]

Maybe there is some insight in the log files.

Check the /tmp/anaconda.*.log files, and also the normal logs such as 'dmesg', and /var/log/messages.

If you're running the anaconda update, and it is still not working, there's a good chance it won't be fixed in 5.4.

[light]

I actually did run 'dmesg', but as I am unfamiliar with it - the information provided to me was useless. Unless you tell me what I should look for in the output. Maybe today in the evening I will take a look at logs and /tmp/anaconda.*.log.

How should I post it here?

[DontPanic]

With dmesg, the most interesting stuff is usually at the end of the output. Most of the contents of dmesg is boot information (which can also be useful from time-to-time).

In this case, we're looking for hardware/driver errors at the end of the dmesg output that are related to the installation.

If something jumps out at you in the logs, you can just quote the relevant section in the body of the post. Otherwise, try to attach it.

[light]

Ok, so here is the log for anaconda and bug log and also dmesg log.

Please let me know what you think. This bug is happening when trying to do manual partitition. Can't even go to the next screen, it just crashes right away.

[DontPanic]

Your dmesg output looks good. I don't see any hardware problems there.

Could you describe the partition arrangement you are trying to achieve?

I see dmesg is showing a successful implementation of ext4 on /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5, but anaconda is having some kind of issue with /dev/sda6.

If you can replicate the install, attach the output of "cat /proc/partitions" after you get the error in the installer.

[light]

Hmm,

maybe the problem is the partitioning table. Is it possible to choose logical/primary partitioning during install? I mean I saw only option to force primary partition. What about logical? Anaconda doesn't seem to give option of making a logical partition. Or maybe I just didn't notice it? Right now, in my opinion, Anaconda treats every partition that we create as primary, right? But what if I dual-boot? Can anaconda use extended partition that I created earlier for another distro? There is 30 gb free on my disk (installer is showing that), when I do 10 gb for "/" it successfully creates it, but then when I want to create 12 gb for "/home" it says there is no more space.

Sorry, I couldn't do another install to answer your questions DontPanic. Came home late and was busy fiddling with another distro.

I am confused by Sabayon's installer process (not Sabayon's fault). I installed Fedora 13 before and I believe it also uses Anaconda. However, partitioning was little bit different that time - it was the only distro on the drive. So it went smooth.