Install problem: No bootable medium found. Again.

[parad9gm]

Hi all,

I am trying to install Sabayon 6.0 LXDE x86 on my new barebones ZOTAC Zbox AD-02 with the AMD Fusion E350 APU. It has no optical drive and no previously installed OS. It has a freshly formatted 320 GB WD Scorpio Black HDD (formatted to NTFS as I have only Windows computers operational) and 2x2GB memory.

I have successfully created bootable Sabayon on both a 2 GB and 8 GB SD cards. I have tried numerous utilities including unetbootin, LiLi, YUMI, etc.

After selecting a boot option (live boot, graphical, or text install), I get

Code: Select all

>> Attempting to mount media:- /dev/sda1
!! Media not found
>> No bootable medium found. Waiting for new devices. . .
...
!! Could not find CD to boot, something else needed!
>> Determining root device. . .
!! Could not find the root block device in .

I've seen a million threads with similar problems reported and tried various things, but I'm not sure where to go from here. I have a little computer which is completely useless and I have little free time to explore.

I would appreciate any suggestions!
parad9gm

[Fitzcarraldo]

If I understand you correctly: a) your machine does not have Windows (or any other OS) installed on it, but you have formatted the entire drive as NTFS; b) you have successfully created a bootable SL 6 LXDE 'LiveCD' on an SD memory card.

Unfortunately, the SL 6 LXDE LiveCD does not contain the GNOME or KDE GUI partition managers. Therefore I suggest you create a bootable SL 6 GNOME 'LiveDVD' on you 8 GB SD card using UNetbootin or whatever, boot it, launch the partition manager GParted and format the HDD to have the partitions you want but using ext4, not NTFS.

It's up to you how you structure the partitions. For information, I tend to create the following partitions:

Partition: /dev/sda1
Label: BOOT
Size: 100 MiB
Format: ext4
Flags: boot

Partition: /dev/sda2
Label: SWAP
Size: If you want SL to be able to hibernate, the same size as your RAM (say 4 GiB)*. If you don't want to be able to hibernate, 512 MiB.
Format: Linux swap

(* Actually it is not necessary to allocate this much disk space, as hibernation is configured to use LZO compression and the RAM image would occupy half or less disk space than the RAM size, but you may as well allocate 4 GiB).

Partition: /dev/sda3
Label: ROOT
Size: 32 GiB
Format: ext4

Partition: /dev/sda4
Label: HOME
Size: The remaining space on the HDD
Format: ext4

Then shutdown SL, remove the SD card that contains SL 6 GNOME LiveDVD, insert an SL card with SL 6 LXDE LiveCD and reboot.

Launch the SL Installer and, when you reach the relevant page, select the manual partition option (it's called Create Custom Layout if I recall correctly). Then use the Installer's GUI partitioning tool to allocate mount points to each of the partitions as follows:

Partition: /dev/sda1
Mount point: /boot

Partition: /dev/sda2
Mount point: swap

Partition: /dev/sda3
Mount point: / (i.e. root)

Partition: /dev/sda4
Mount point: /home

Then continue on with the installation.

Good luck.

[throdon]

I believe he is getting this error right after udev loads. I have had these errors a lot on Sabayon live usb and it's either when you have to push alt+f1 for verbose or push f2 for verbose during the boot up, but I am willing to bet he is unable to even get to the splash screen with the sound of this error.

If this is the same error I used to have, I always tried a different USB port or even a different flash/thumb drive.

AFAIK as long as you can get the installer to run it will partition the hard drive during the install process. I have only used the lxde x86-64 and the cdx x86-64, but both installers partitioned my hard drive quite nice.

[raman]

This error is showing often. The few days ago, I tried to install XFCE DAILY Sabayon. The same problem.
Helps installing XFCE Sabayon 6.0 Edition. I tried to install daily to have much less upgrades to do.

I was using unetbootin and the same pendrive on both cases. I'm using FAT formated pen and have no problem if I use the same .ISO repeatedly.
Earlier I had similar problem sometimes, so for my opinion this is Sabayon problem with creating anaconda entries. Sometimes anaconda can't find root path, dunno why.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I believe he is getting this error right after udev loads. I have had these errors a lot on Sabayon live usb and it's either when you have to push alt+f1 for verbose or push f2 for verbose during the boot up, but I am willing to bet he is unable to even get to the splash screen with the sound of this error.

Oh, my misunderstanding. I'll have to try and stop speed-scanning posts. I saw the "/dev/sda1" and assumed the OP was getting the problem after running the Installer following a success boot into the DE of the LiveCD/SD.

In any case, the error message he is getting is interesting:

Code: Select all

>> Attempting to mount media:- /dev/sda1
!! Media not found

I wonder if that is actually a bug in the LiveCD boot software. I'd be inclined to try a different spin, to see if that works. And, I wonder what "/dev/sda1" is really referring to. The LiveCD or the HDD? It would still be interesting to try booting a SL 6 GNOME LiveCD/SD and reformatting the HDD as ext4 rather than NTFS to see if that has an effect.

[parad9gm]

If I understand you correctly: a) your machine does not have Windows (or any other OS) installed on it, but you have formatted the entire drive as NTFS; b) you have successfully created a bootable SL 6 LXDE 'LiveCD' on an SD memory card.

Unfortunately, the SL 6 LXDE LiveCD does not contain the GNOME or KDE GUI partition managers. Therefore I suggest you create a bootable SL 6 GNOME 'LiveDVD' on you 8 GB SD card using UNetbootin or whatever, boot it, launch the partition manager GParted and format the HDD to have the partitions you want but using ext4, not NTFS.

Hi,
You are correct in the first part. But your suggestions are useful still because I would like to try a few things based off of this (trying the larger LiveDVD GNOME version, possibly loading up a bootable gparted from LiLi to format the hdd, etc).

I believe he is getting this error right after udev loads. I have had these errors a lot on Sabayon live usb and it's either when you have to push alt+f1 for verbose or push f2 for verbose during the boot up, but I am willing to bet he is unable to even get to the splash screen with the sound of this error.

If this is the same error I used to have, I always tried a different USB port or even a different flash/thumb drive.

Also correct, I get to the LiveCD boot screen with options for installation or starting Sabayon. As it begins to load, I press Alt+F1 for the information I posted above.

This error is showing often. The few days ago, I tried to install XFCE DAILY Sabayon. The same problem.
Helps installing XFCE Sabayon 6.0 Edition. I tried to install daily to have much less upgrades to do.

I was using unetbootin and the same pendrive on both cases. I'm using FAT formated pen and have no problem if I use the same .ISO repeatedly.
Earlier I had similar problem sometimes, so for my opinion this is Sabayon problem with creating anaconda entries. Sometimes anaconda can't find root path, dunno why.

So would you suggest using an older or different build and upgrading? My internet connection bandwidth is approximately 120 kbps, but I suppose I can download more ISOs given enough time.

Oh, my misunderstanding. I'll have to try and stop speed-scanning posts. I saw the "/dev/sda1" and assumed the OP was getting the problem after running the Installer following a success boot into the DE of the LiveCD/SD.

In any case, the error message he is getting is interesting:

Code: Select all

>> Attempting to mount media:- /dev/sda1
!! Media not found

I wonder if that is actually a bug in the LiveCD boot software. I'd be inclined to try a different spin, to see if that works. And, I wonder what "/dev/sda1" is really referring to. The LiveCD or the HDD? It would still be interesting to try booting a SL 6 GNOME LiveCD/SD and reformatting the HDD as ext4 rather than NTFS to see if that has an effect.

I will try the GNOME suggestion as quickly as I can download that version (read: tomorrow morning), but first I'll try bootable gparted.

If I go to the shell and use "cat /proc/partitions" I get two results (which are from recollection right now), a partition "sda" with 312 billion bytes ("320" GB HDD) and "sda1" with slightly fewer bytes than sda. I did not know what to make of this last night, but I hope it's relevant.

[Fitzcarraldo]

If I go to the shell and use "cat /proc/partitions" I get two results (which are from recollection right now), a partition "sda" with 312 billion bytes ("320" GB HDD) and "sda1" with slightly fewer bytes than sda. I did not know what to make of this last night, but I hope it's relevant.

sda is the disk, and sda1 is the partition on the disk (Partition No. 1, to be precise). If you had e.g. four partitions on disk sda then they would be sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4. If you create only one partition on the disk (it does not have to occupy the entire disk) then that would be named sda1. If you had two disks connected simultaneously then the second disk would be sdb, and any partitions on it would be sdb1, sdb2 etc. The basic scheme is sd<disk><partition on that disk>.

[parad9gm]

sda is the disk, and sda1 is the partition on the disk (Partition No. 1, to be precise). If you had e.g. four partitions on disk sda then they would be sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4. If you create only one partition on the disk (it does not have to occupy the entire disk) then that would be named sda1. If you had two disks connected simultaneously then the second disk would be sdb, and any partitions on it would be sdb1, sdb2 etc. The basic scheme is sd<disk><partition on that disk>.

Right, I just wasn't sure why they didn't share the same volume in bytes. And it also shows that it doesn't see the LiveCD/SD as a disk volume.

[Fitzcarraldo]

It's normal for the first partition not to start right at the beginning of the disk (mine start at 2048 bytes from the start), as you have the MBR plus some of the boot loader software (either Windows Boot Loader or GRUB or another boot loader) at the beginning of the disk. See: The structure at the start of a hard disk in a PC. Furthermore:

3.1.2. Partitioning a 4 kilobyte sector harddisk for optimal performance
To partition these disks for optimal performance, parted must be used and the start and end of the partitions must be given in sectors, not in kilobytes, mega or gigabytes. Specify the start / size in sectors by adding an "s" to the end of the number. Generally, it is a good idea to align the partitions to a multiple of one MB (1024x1024 bytes). To achieve alignment, start sectors of partitions should always be a multiple of 2048, and end sectors should always be a multiple of 2048, minus 1. Note that the first partition can not start at sector 0, use sector 2048 instead.

Not sure why the LiveCD/SD is not seen in /proc/partitions, though, and am not on a Linux machine to check it at the moment, but what do fdisk -l and df -h show?

[parad9gm]

It's normal for the first partition not to start right at the beginning of the disk (mine start at 2048 bytes from the start), as you have the MBR plus some of the boot loader software (either Windows Boot Loader or GRUB or another boot loader) at the beginning of the disk. See: The structure at the start of a hard disk in a PC. Furthermore:

Oh, yeah. I forgot about the MBR and such. Also, excellent reference, I will keep these things in mind.

Not sure why the LiveCD/SD is not seen in /proc/partitions, though, and am not on a Linux machine to check it at the moment, but what do fdisk -l and df -h show?

I will be able to check this in a few hours and report back.