[SOLVED] MGA2 CD installs MGA3 off Cauldron instead

[artificeprime]

Hi all. Had a hdd in my main Mageia box (the old x86 in my sig) crap out on me the other day. Tossed in a new one this morning and tried to re-install MGA2 via the dual-arch CD using mageia.webconquest.com as the install mirror. GUI froze up immediately (no scrolling package lists, blue progress bars, etc.) but the system hadn't locked up and the new drive and network connection were as busy as I expected, so I checked tty1 and 3 to see what the installer was up to and lo: it was installing MGA3 from cauldron (mageia.webconquest.com/distrib/cauldron/i586/media/core/release/). I let it continue to see how far it would get. Surprisingly, the GUI recovered and the install completed "successfully" (if you don't count the several hundred dependency failures). No surprise, the system is now an unbootable mess.

I'll take another whack at re-installing from another mirror in a few hours and post how it goes. Hopefully they're not all misdirecting like this.

[Ken-Bergen]

If you mean adding http://mageia.webconquest.com/ as supplemental media during installation it works as expected here.
All packages downloaded are from distrib/2 not distrib/cauldron.

[artificeprime]

If you mean adding http://mageia.webconquest.com/ as supplemental media during installation it works as expected here.

Thanks for the reply Ken, and yes, that's exactly what I mean, except that I'm getting completely unexpected behaviour. I've never seen the installer misfire like this before (been doing dual-arch installs this way since MDV2007). In the meanwhile I retried with distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr and ftp.nluug.nl, and at my end both dipped into Cauldron. I'd begun to wonder if Cauldron had been set to release for the Beta testing and I'd missed a related blog notice somewhere.

I find it weird that I didn't get some error message from the GUI about a version mismatch between the CD and the repos, which is what I would have expected. I did however, get a message saying something to the effect of "Cannot locate base system", but I'm not sure what prompted it and once I'd dismissed the dialog (with "OK" iirc) the bogus install proceeded.

Anyway, I've since manually pointed the installer toward mageia.webconquest.com/distrib/2/ and am happy to report MGA2 now appears to be re-installing correctly, but I must say that if I were a n00b in desperate need of a re-install after hdd failure, I'd have found this situation unbearably frustrating.

Edit: for readability and <gasp!> a split infinitive.

[Ken-Bergen]

I find it weird that I didn't get some error message from the GUI about a version mismatch between the CD and the repos, which is what I would have expected. I did however, get a message saying something to the effect of "Cannot locate base system", but I'm not sure what prompted it and once I'd dismissed the dialog (with "OK" iirc) the bogus install proceeded.

It looks to me that you have a bad CD.
I'm wondering what would happen with that CD and no network media.

[artificeprime]

It looks to me that you have a bad CD.

Could be, but it's the same disk I used last May when 2 was first released, and it installed without issue on two x86 machines plus two x86_64 laptops (one of which I'm typing this post from). At the time, md5 checked out for both the downloaded image and K3B's burn. It's still busy with the install right now, but when it finishes I'll look it over for dings and scratches.

By the way, in your first reply, were you also testing with the dual-arch CD?

[Ken-Bergen]

By the way, in your first reply, were you also testing with the dual-arch CD?

Yes, that's what you said you were using and it would have been meaningless to test with something else.

[artificeprime]

Yes, that's what you said you were using and it would have been meaningless to test with something else.

Ha. Awesome, thanks.

The re-install was successful, I've restored my /home from tarball, and just have to deal with those radeon-firmware issues and I don't remember what else from months ago. I'm revisiting almost a year's worth of tweaks and fixes with Mageia 3 right on the horizon. Man! If this drive had to die, I really wish it could've just hung on until the end of April....

As for the CD, visual inspection shows no problems, not even so much as a fingerprint, but I can't produce a matching md5 off it because I can't find the exact byte count for the iso, and my own copy (which I see no point in re-downloading) got hosed with the dead drive.

I've marked the thread as "solved".