[SOLVED] Mageia 3 B 2 - Btrfs Issue - Bug or Not Supported?

[ghmitch]

I just attempted to install Mageia 3 Beta 2 on to an empty 80GB drive on my system.

I made the usual choices for Language, Keyboard, etc - all uneventful.

When I came to disk partitioning I chose "custom" install and proceded to choose one of my empty 80 GB drives, chose create one primary BtrFS partition encompassing the whole disk. I assigned / (root) as the mount point. I then proceeded. I was warned of not having a swap partition assigned and instructed the installer to ignore and proceed. The installer continued and formatted the drive accordingly all uneventfully. Then suddenly everything came to a halt with:

"An error occurred.
Mounting partition UUID - 085da9f9-b18d-431c-bcbe-db1439-ef2214 in directory /mnt failed"

I then restarted my existing Mageia 2 OS and verified that the drive in question had indeed been formatted BtrFS and it had. Next I attempted to mount the BtrFS partition in question on /mnt. It worked uneventfully, no problems encountered whatsoever.

Before making a bug report or proceeding to download Beta 3 and retrying, I want to ask does anyone know if this is a known problem? Or if what I am doing is simply unsupported? Obviously I would like to move the OS side of my machine to BtrFS and decided to start out with as simple a configuration as I could come up with. I would appreciate any and all comments.

[gohlip]

I don't think Mageia3 in its current form can be installed in a btrfs partition because grub-legacy is by default installed even if you choose grub2 (grub-legacy cannot handle btrfs).

However, I can confirm Mageia3 (or 2) can access other btrfs partition (forgot if installing btrfs-progs is necessary, but off-hand, I don't think so).

Hope this helps. Cheers.

[edit] - (Of course) if you insist on using grub-legacy and btrfs, it may (haven't done this in a long long time) help if /boot is in a separate ext2 partition and / in a btrfs partition.

[ghmitch]

After going back in and changing the / filesystem from BtrFS to ext4, the install went almost flawlessly. I will include the one flaw (not really a flaw on Mageia's part) in another post. As I broke out of the install itself and went through the configuration phase, I was wowed by the fact that the installer uneventfully and automatically brought the install current by downloading and installing all updates to date via Internet connection. That is the very first time this feature has EVER worked for me with any distribution. YEAH! So my major questions are answered here. I want to especially thank gohlip for taking the time to reply to my post, that reply was a great help. - George

[gohlip]

You're most welcome, George and I am glad Mageia works great for you.
Cheers, take care.

[ghmitch]

I am labeling this topic solved since I am concluding that it is irrelevant since root install on BtrFS is obviously not supported as of Mageia 3. It would be nice to see this subject addressed in the final release notes. Certainly Mageia 3 covers all the groundwork for making this happen, but there is indeed a limit as to how much ground can be covered in one release. What I am seeing so far is truly a stellar product. I am delighted. - George

[doktor5000]

I am labeling this topic solved since I am concluding that it is irrelevant since root on BtrFS is obviously not supported as of Mageia 3. It would be nice to see this subject addressed in the final release notes.

Feel free to add it to the https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_3_Errata or to the release notes https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_3_Release_Notes together with a link to the relevant forum thread