Install: My adventure after mkinitrd failed

[ca-on-adam]

I was moving along in an install using the boot.iso network installation. Making the mistake of running the install under QEMU without virtualization support, I had myself a very slow install. Nonetheless I was persistent and left the install running for a few days. When I came back to it, I was at the user passwords setup screen. After I filled that in and clicked 'next', the system went about running the initial startup program but led to an "ERROR" screen that said:

Code: Select all

An error occured:
mkinitrd failed:
(mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-4.1.8-desktop-1.mga5.img 4.1.8-desktop-1.mga5)
Error: .


My best guess is that there is apparently a 10-minute limit on the mkinitrd process, and running under a painfully slow emulator, it exceeded that limit and was killed.

Thus my adventure began. This is to share what I did for others who might want to know, and also to ask if there is anything else I should have done to complete the install manually.

• I booted into a LiveCD.
• From the command line, I ran commands to get myself into a position to run that failed command
• # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
• # mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
• # mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
• # mount -t sysfs none /mnt/sys
• # chroot /mnt
• (I run the failed command) # mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-4.1.8-desktop-1.mga5.img 4.1.8-desktop-1.mga5

Then after that, I guessed that the next/last critical step would be the bootloader. I ran

Code: Select all

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

After rebooting into an emergency GRUB shell, I realized that I had to make a menu.lst file. So I ran "nano /boot/grub/menu.list" and filled the empty file with:

Code: Select all

timeout 10

title mageia
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-desktop root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd-desktop.img


Ok, so my adventure had reached a milestone of getting the VM to boot. Now I was presented with a text login screen. I wanted an X login screen. More specifically, I wanted whatever display manager was installed to run. So I ran

Code: Select all

systemctl list-unit-files

and found that there was a disabled lightdm unit file there. I ran

Code: Select all

service lightdm enable

then

Code: Select all

service lightdm start

and voila! I had a running display manager. I had chosen XFCE as the desktop for the system, and after logging in, it came up without any noticeable errors.

Now the big question: What did I miss, if anything?

I am familiar with the GUI installer, and I recall that the sections I missed included a "summary" screen, that allows for final changes to the system, and a section for running software updates. Obviously software updates aren't essential to completing the install, but perhaps there was something else that was missed due to the error.