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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
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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:
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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
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systemctl list-unit-files
and found that there was a disabled lightdm unit file there. I ran
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service lightdm enable
then
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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.