[SOLVED] Install Attempt Is Aborting

[isadora]

I've been having a look at Mageia 3 which I only "discovered " a few days ago. After a few sessions of looking at the layout from a Live DVD boot and not managing to get my wi-fi to connect I decided to install. I pre-prepared a couple partitions for root and home. My first attempts to install had me hesitant to commit to the / and /home mount points because I wasn't sure if I would have an option to retain my existing MBR or if it would be overwritten. I'm a user and not an expert. Having got the assurance in my thread about wi-fi that I would have the boot options I need, I committed to the install but it is aborting itself at some point. I hope the symptoms will point to some mistake I'm making here. I specified the / and /home partitions I'd prepared and labeled using gparted. I had these partitions as ext4 but told the installer to go ahead and format both. Proceeding further, I got the window telling me that my install wouldn't need a bunch of included hardware drivers and locales that don't pertain to me - nice! It said it was removing these items and then that it was installing. I stepped into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and returned to see the Mageia desktop and no activity or dialog. Huh? I opened 'Install to Harddisk' again and started from square 1 minus the formatting. Again, the installer said it was installing and I kept my eyes on it. With the progress bar about halfway across (I think) the window disappeared and again I was looking at the bare desktop of my Live session. I rebooted to my working PCLinuxOS GNOME 2 install (also Mandriva derived) and looked at the 2 Mageia partitions. They are populated and Grub shows an obvious sample menu.lst, not yet written for new config. the Home directory shows Live as the user. Sorry for the verbosity but I hope it's obvious what is wrong. I was never asked by the installer to enter my name, password, or root password so it never got to that point.

azziam

[doktor5000]

Which live media did you use, and did you check the md5sum after downloading?

[azziam]

Which live media did you use, and did you check the md5sum after downloading?

I used the GNOME 64-bit .iso. I hadn't checked the MD5 after downloading but did think to check it this morning. I also burned a new DVD-R because I had copied the install files to a flash drive so I could burn the disk in my win7 laptop since Brasero has been getting errors. I thought there was a chance I had pulled the flash drive prematurely although I had unmounted it. But, I'm getting the identical result with the new disk. At about 60% of the progress bar, the dialog box goes blank except to say 'please wait' and then it disappears and the DVD drive spins down. Of course it would help if someone else had seen this same thing happen.

[azziam]

It just occurred to me, since the partitions seem to have the essentials, maybe this install handed me the perfect solution for me - to just edit the menu.lst's and see if it will fit in just as I'd like. After all, my main reason for trying the distro is to see if I can get to like GNOME 3 after being very fond of GNOME 2 for it's flexibility. It doesn't seem 3 will be very changeable. I am impressed by the Mageia overall integrated look and feel, though. I'll report whether I am able to add Mageia to my existing boootloader and get it up from there.

[azziam]

I think it's great that Mageia dumped me out of the install where it did and I would presume it was because it saw that I already had a / and /home on partitions in this system. A comment to that effect would have been good though.

I was successful in adding an entry in my existing Grub menu.lst and getting Mageia to boot from the hd install. I had a couple boot failures till I had the boot= argument right and then it doesn't like my GeForce 6600 display card and said I would have to add nokmsboot. I'm aware of this problem with current nVidia drivers. In my other everyday distro I had to get the legacy X11 and dkms packages for the nvidia304 from the repos. The bigger problem is that I still have no wi-fi. Back to that thread for me and out.

[My install actually turned out better than I expected and I'm marking it solved.]