Drak installer nightmares...

[omelette]

Wow, I'd forgotten how bad (sorry!) this package is - I had hoped it would have improved since I tried it a few years ago with TinyME...

I had kindly cleared a little 15gig partition for Mageia, having finally wiped an old, barely ever used XP install, with the intention of having a dual-boot Mageia/Fedora setup. So I reset and boot from USB (hurray!), it detects the unused space and offers to install it there - good to this point, before everything starts going downhill! I expect it to just carry on from there with the installation but unfortunately, it tells me it needs to reboot before continuing - now I'm beginning to have a real sense of deja-vu thanks to my little stint with TinyMe, and have a sickly feeling about it all! Well, on rebooting I find Drak has screwed up the bootloader so Fedora-boot is gone - I had expected it to go installing its own boot-loader after installation completed, but why does it mess with it at this stage? Anyway, I continue on and reboot the Live_CD. It now suggests a "Use existing partitions" 'solution', which makes me a little more uneasy - why the plural? It seems to be suffering a form of amnesia because of the reboot. Clicking 'Next' also seems to confirm that it intends to wipe the Fedora partition as it lists its partition/mount-point here! It even offers a second 'solution' to install on a tiny 2-3gigs of free-space left on a W32 partition, but no talk about blitzing M$ - it seems like Linux distros don't seem too happy about sharing the same computer!

It is not at all clear what this application intends to do. Another thing that doesn't help is that in 'Expert' mode, you cannot read most of the text it prints as there is no scroll-bars. I discovered that by booting the desktop and running Drak from there, rather than selecting to directly install that you could work your way around that. But the most annoying thing I find about Drak is its insistence on rebooting, look at it side-ways and it insists that a reboot is needed - none of the partitioning software that comes with other distros does this. They simply warn you that the changes cannot be undone then get on with it! Not Drak...

So I'm stuck, daring not to go any further. Is Drak intent on wiping Fedora? I'm typing this from the Live_CD desktop, eying Drak nervously while wondering what to do next. Hopefully I should be able to get Grub to reinstall the Fedora bootloader...

[Lebarhon]

hello,
I think you had several problems.
First, from number 16, Fedora uses Grub2 and not Grub legacy any more, Mageia is still with Grub Legacy. This explains why your boot loader was screwed up.
Secondly, Drak install never reboot unless a big problem arises. What were your choices ? Format or not ? Same /home as Fedora or not ? May be it was Grub2 ?
Mageia said "Use existing partitions" in the plural, because by default it uses 3 partitions: /, /home and /swap.

[omelette]

Thanks for the reply. It's actually Fedora 13->upgraded to F14 I have, so I don't think that's the reason. As for the rebooting, I'm left confused - from my experience with it, I cannot do anything related to resizing or reformatting a partition without Drak then insisting that a reboot is necessary! NONE of the other installers that I've tried behave in this way. After sorting out my Grub issues, and just to prove I wasn't going completely insane, I stuck an old Ubuntu 10.04 Live_CD into the drive and tried installing this on the same machine - it both detected Fedora and offered a dual-boot solution, which I accepted, and all without even a hint of needing a reboot! And having installed Ubuntu many times, in 'expert-mode', it will stick the OS on whatever partition you specify without ever hinting of a reboot. Off the top of my head, this also goes for Fedora, Mint, Debian and OpenSuse.

Whereas with Drak, with an identical scenario - namely, 15gig of disk-space marked as 'empty' - it detects it, suggests an installation there, writes some partitioning info to the disk, then INSISTS that a reboot is required! It is not enough to just restart Drak. And having used it pretty extensively with TinyMe, and on various machines, I can say honestly that this has always been my experience with it. So after the insisted-upon reboot, Drak now suggests the "existing partitions" solution. Click on 'Next' and you invariably find it now has highlighted ALL Linux partitions (shying away from the almighty M$ ones) with their tabs clicked for 'Reformat'. And this is with "Normal-mode" selected, ie. the one your linux-newbie would go with - that is nonsensical & just plain wrong!

I wisely (as it turned out!) opted to try installing Mageia on an old machine that I use for testing distros second-time around, rather that on my laptop as in the first instance. After the compulsory reboot after it had found the disk-space marked 'empty', I chose 'expert-mode'. Despite having also been required to assign a mount-point for the new installation before the reboot, Drak seems to have forgotten about this, 'cos if you just click 'Next' you find it intends to format a completely different partition - you must click 'previous', select 'Mount point' and reselect the still-selected mount-point. Now when you hit 'Next' to continue, it has the correct partition selected for formatting...

But it get better, (or worse rather) below is a link to a snapshot of what Drak did to my drive's partitioning after it had successfully installed Mageia. Note that I wrote the boot-loader to 'sda10' rather than the default 'sda' in order to prevent it wiping my default (and prettier) Mint Linux bootloader, which is also Grub2-based, the idea being that I would just run Mint in 'rescue-mode', and have Grub find & add Mageia to its boot-menu list. Which it did wonderfully. A problem arose when I tried to boot Mageia though, a rather ominous "Kernel panic". So I fired up Mint, ran Gparted, only to find it lists the entire disk as "unallocated" - bizarre considering that all of the partitions are visible & mountable in Nautilus. When I then fired up Disk Utility it becomes evident that something is seriously wrong - when I try to delete the Mageia partition (or anything to the right of it in the pic) it fails, issuing a "overlapping partitions" error!

Drak has completely screwed up the disks partitioning, it had been perfect 30min before. Drak is a turd in my opinion. And 2-3 days after downloading Mageia, I still haven't completed an installation...

http://ubuntuone.com/p/1COa/
http://ubuntuone.com/p/1COq/
http://ubuntuone.com/p/1COs/

[John66]

omelette

About the problem you described in your original post.
Please, provide the following information:

1. Which media did you use to install Mageia? Was it a Live CD?

2. If it was a Mageia Live CD (Gnome or KDE), boot with it and go to Mageia Control Center >> Local disks >> Manage hard disk partitions
You 'll see your partitions in a similar way, as the screenshots you posted from Disk Utility in Linux Mint.
Click the "Toggle to expert mode" button (at the low right place of the window), so that more information will be visible, about your partitions.
Now, click on the first partition (on the left) and take a screenshot.
Repeat that, with all the partitions in that "strip" that represents your hard drive, no matter if you use them or not. Take screenshots of all of them.
Then, I assume you have to save these screenshots somewhere so you can post them here (a usb flash or a partition in your Fedora installation), or if you have internet access
from the live cd you can post them.

3. Even if you don't have a Mageia Live CD, boot with another distro's live cd that you have handy, open a terminal as root and type

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fdisk -l

Then post the output here.
Add some notes, if you can, in that output (maybe with bold letters or different color), explaining what the various partitions are used for, or should be.
Or just write the notes in your post.
For example: "/dev/sda6 is where Fedora root partition is", or "/dev/sda2 should be my windows partition and now it's Mageia's /home", or "this partition was 20 GB an d now it's smaller".
Some notes like that

I hope I didn't ask too much...

[omelette]

@john66 - Ask too much? Of course not - but I got it sorted finally! A brief summing-up may be in order.

Just let me say I'm totally confused if others aren't getting those incessant "reboot required" messages after partitioning, I mean, they are constant! Anyway, the one (and only) good thing I have to say about the Drak partitioner is that it was able to delete the partitions that it had created, thereby 'fixing' the disk - whereas both Disk Utility & Gparted refused to proceed past the error. The way I got it to install was simply to first create the partition with Gparted, then in expert-mode, point Drak to the partition - as simple as that! All my problems were caused by the partitioning part of Drak!

The 'kernel-panic' was probably a result of writing the boot-loader to 'sda10' rather than 'sda', the default selection. Or it could be a problem with Mint's Grub2 recovery thingy - although it found Mageia & added it to the boot-menu, it didn't work. Dunno, but once I write it to 'sda' it boots perfectly. The only down-side is that Mageia only adds Grub-legacy installed OS's it detects to its boot-loader, so I'm missing Ubuntu & Mint from the 6 installed! I had a quick go at sorting it with 'grub-update' but didn't achieve much before losing interest, I only use that pc for testing stuff out anyway. But armed with what I'd learned, I also got it installed on my laptop beside Fedora - another Grub-legacy - so they are quite happy together! Now I can get on with the main business of playing with the OS itself.

With the little I have played with it since installing it, I am happy to find that I was able to get folder-sharing set up & working straight away - more than I can say for other OS's I've tried, particularly F15. The only thing I've found that doesn't work properly with Mageia on the laptop is the Bluetooth - at least the switching off/on part anyway, whereas it does with F14/Gnome. Maybe the 300+ meg of updates that have yet to be installed with make a difference...

Thanks for your help guys.

[John66]

Glad to got it sorted.

But, still, I can't understand, the reason for the reboots (never happened to me with any distro, including Mandriva/Mageia, the last 3 years), after partitioning.
I use also GPparted live-cd for partitioning (except for my main distro, that was initially installed). I don't format the partitions, just leave them as "Linux native".
Then, check them with fdisk to see if everything is OK with "sector counting". So, the partitioning is the same in my hard disks for the last year or so.
Finnaly, when I want to install a new distro, I choose which partitions I want to use (that are already made in the past, as I said before) and format them
with every distro's tool during installation.

In Mageia Installer, AFAIR, there is no "install alongside other OS" selection, that you might see in other distros.
You can do that type of partitioning, in the "Custom disk partitioning" selection, but "manually".

I don't know if the 3 screenshots you posted (from the Disk Utility in Mint), now that you got it sorted, would show the same partitioning. I think it might be different now.
I'm saying that, because in these pictures, the last two "parts" of your hard disk (on the right), were "useless", just empty space ("unallocated). You had already 2 primary
partitions & 1 extended partition (on the left side of these 2 "parts"), plus 1 "part" that is called "Free 42 GB" (which could be used as the 3rd primary}.
If I am correct, "Free" in Disk Utility, means also "unallocated space". Or maybe just "not formated"? (I can't test it now, my hard disks are full).
Whether I am correct or not, the only way to use these 2 last parts, is to "merge" them with the "Free 42 GB" one, in a bigger, 3rd primary partition.
That's why I asked these information in my previous post. I thought that -maybe- that partitioning scheme caused the reboots.

As for the GRUB installation:
Are you sure it was a "kernel panic", or just an error like "Error 15" (or 17 or 22, the most common in GRUB) plus "can't find folder" or "wrong partition", or something
like that? Because there should be no problems if you installed GRUB in sda10. Well, that's the "correct" place.
What I mean by that?
Your "primary" distro (whatever it is) is better to have it's GRUB in sda. And all the other distros, in the partition where their root directory / is.
So, from your "primary" distro's GRUB, you can "chainload" to the other distros' GRUB.
From GRUB legacy to chainload to another GRUB legacy (like: from Mageia to Fedora, or the opposite) it's quite simple.
For example, in Mageia's /boot/grub/menu.lst file, you add this entry (for Fedora):
title Fedora
root (hdx,y)
chainloader +1
where in x you write the hard disk number and in y the partition number (both numbers in GRUB legacy, start counting from 0). So sda5 is hd0,4.
You can do that, also, from GUI (in Mageia Control Center, in Boot section). It's even even more simple.
But "chainloading" from GRUB legacy to GRUB 2, it's more "tricky", especially in GUI.
So, it is better to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in Mageia to "point" to Mint's (for example) GRUB 2. You add this entry:
title Mint
root (hdx,y)
kernel /boot/grub/core.img
savedefault
again, the numbers for x & y, start counting from 0, as the above example.
Now, save your changes and go in MCC, in the appropriate Boot section, and see how that entry you added manually, was "translated" in GUI's entry.
Not so obvious, don't you think? You can take a screenshot of that, for future use, although I find it much easier to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.


As you said, you got sorted out your problem, but I thought that I should share with you the above thoughts and notes.
Maybe you'll find them useful and not a waste of your time.
Enjoy Mageia
John

[omelette]

Learning something new is never a waste of time, I really appreciated your post!

I'm frankly bemused that you have hardly ever seen Drak demand a reboot - it seems to happen almost every time I used it to alter/format partitions, and is particularly burned into my memory with regards to TinyMe, which was a major part of the reason I gave up on that distro! And on 3 different computers as well, so it's hardly hardware related.

Maybe it's partition-layout related - on the laptop from 'left-to-right' I had; Primary 80meg Dell Diagnostic W32 partition->Primary 15GB NTFS->15GB, 15GB of 'empty' space for Mageia, Extended Partition: 42GB Fedora ext4 logical partition, 1GB logical swap partition.

With this layout, whenever I booted Drak to install, it would locate the 'empty' space and offer to install it there, I'd accept this, it would then write to the disk and inform me that a reboot was required before it could continue. And I did this at least 2-3 times and was always told a reboot was required! My main concern was what it was going to do to my Fedora partition - as I said, it was listing all 6 Linux partitions on my 'test' pc, and it was checking the 'format' box on my laptops Fedora partition.

As for where to put the boot-loader, what you outlined above was my understanding as well (but in broader brush-strokes, without the detail! ) - from experience I knew it would wipe Mints boot-loader if it installed to 'sda', so I went through the procedure of installing Mageia with its boot-loader on sda10 twice just to make sure I didn't do something wrong first time around. And yes, after perhaps 10-15 lines of boot-text, "kernel panic" is definitely mentioned along with either the UUID being invalid or something along the lines of "(hd0,0) block not found" - don't recall exactly! The (hd0,0) bit is right though. I also checked that the Mageia partition's UUID that Mints Grub-recovery added to its menu list in 'grub.cfg' was correct.

On a slightly different topic, I also noticed that the bootable USB that 'Mandriva-seed' produces - and which is the only one that worked for me - is definitely strange. Gparted shows it as having multiple partions (3 I think) with the main one being listed as having an "unknown" format. When I saw this I wasn't surprised that the usual UNetbootin or 'dd' copy didn't work! I mention this because since Mageia is a fork of Mandriva, maybe it uses a non-standard boot-loading methodology as well...

Edit: I forgot to respond to the partition-corruption thingy. If you look at the third pic. it lists the 80gig drive as having some absurd number of terabytes - I think there's a minus sign thrown in there as well! So imo, definitely a problem. But for Drak being able to resolve this, I'd have just opted for reformatting the drive.

[omelette]

I was more than a little curious as to why I seemed to be the only one who has experienced on a regular basis the Drak-installer insisting that a reboot was needed after partitioning/reformatting, so I did a little investigating. It's surprisingly easy to reproduce - just create a partition and format it, Drak will then insist that a reboot is required! It's the act of formatting it that is the trigger.

And before someone insists that this is 'normal' for whatever reason, I have yet to be told by Gparted that a reset is needed after I create/format a partition...

[John66]

Well, I must disagree with you. There must be some other cause for you problem, not the format itself. The format prompt, maybe it's something like a "side-effect", not the cause.
I have 5 installations of Mageia. I' ve installed all Mandriva versions, from 2009.0 to 2012.0, each version more than 2 or 3 times.
All these, in the same hard disks, the last 3 years.
I was never prompted for a reboot, before the installation was complete.

I will ask you, again, to boot with a live cd (Mageia, Fedora, whatever you have handy), it's better that way, because no hard disk will be mounted.
Your problem is in your one and only HDD (as seen in your screenshots), so it's sda
Copy-paste in a terminal (as root) the following commands, one by one, then save the whole output in a text file, in one of your partitions you can access later,
when you'll reboot in your machine.

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fdisk -lu=sectors /dev/sda

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fdisk -lu=cylinders /dev/sda

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cfdisk -P s /dev/sda

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cfdisk -P t /dev/sda

Then, post here that txt file.
In the last two commands I expect only an error message (of course, I might be wrong). If that's the case, don't forget to copy-paste it too, in a different txt file.

I have some more ideas, but I want to see that output first.
If you want some more information or help, about how to manage what I wrote above, don't hesitate to ask.

[omelette]

John66, excuse the delay. Not trying to fob you off or anything, but having just booted up the Live-CD from the old pc and issued the first of your commands, I get the following;

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[live@localhost ~]$ fdisk -lu=sectors /dev/sda
bash: fdisk: command not found

Just so we are on the same page here - and maybe I should have said so explicitly earlier - I concede (now) that the Drak Installer seems to install the OS without a problem. After my personal revelation, what I'm saying now is that if you create a partition with Drak and then manually format it, you will invariably be told that a reboot is required. And yes, I know that Drak (and almost all other auto-installers) will automatically reformat the partition, but from force of habit I always manually formatted the partition after creating it! And in my view (I may be wrong!) this is still a bug of sorts - I can create & format partitions ad-nauseum with Gparted and never be told that I must then reboot the computer! And as I alluded to earlier, this is not confined to the old sda hard-disk, it also occurs with the laptop and also on another even older pc - the one I was trying to give a new lease of life to with TinyMe.

Edit: After I wrote the above, I decided that a picture would probably worth a thousand words, so opted to install Mageia & post a snapshot of the error. It's now working perfectly! I just don't get it, the only thing it may be is that over the weekend I decided to install WinXP on a partition, and after doing so, on rebooting with Ubuntu Live-CD to use its Grub2 to restore all of the OS menu-entries I found that although all the partitions files systems were still there, Ubuntu could no longer detect any of them. In frustration I just formatted the disk with Gparted, creating 3 primary partitions! But it gets better - when I then tried reinstalling any M$ OS, it would issue a "unable to boot" type error when It copied the files & restarted. A Linux OS would install & boot normally! The only way I got it working was to delete all partitions through the WInXP installer & create a partition from there. Maybe this has something to do with what I'm seeing!

Except for the fact that this required rebooting has also happened with other hard-disks! I'm genuinely confused...

[doktor5000]

Just tested in a clean virtual machine, created a partition in the installer manually, and formatted it. No need to reboot.
Seems your partition table was broken before.

BTW: You launched the fdisk command above as normal user, you should have run it as root instead

[omelette]

Well, if that the case, it's genuinely good to know the problem was on my side, not Drak's - that rebooting nearly drove me to distraction though!

It would of course mean I have a similar problem with my laptop's drive. Come to think of it, whenever I use 'Image For DOS' to create a partition-image backup, it always reports some file-system problem when it first reads the disk - never interfered with the operation so I never gave it much thought...

[John66]

1. I don't understand what "Image for DOS" is. Maybe it's something I haven't used yet.
I'm just curious:
What program are you using and gives you that selection?
And you're doing that kind of image(image for DOS), for a linux partition?
Or, maybe, you're copying (cloning) a partition? (which is different)

2. If you want to have XP in your system and you follow the solution to format everything and start all over again,
what you did, at last, was correct.
Delete (not format) every partition with a live GParted cd. Of course, you can do it with the XP installation cd.
Then, format a primary partition with the XP cd during the installation. Windoz (the OS) "needs" to be in the 1st primary partition, of the 1st HDD.
Also, there, you specify the size of the XP partition. Go on with your XP installation, reboots, updates, reboots, updates... (I admire your courage, I refuse to do that anymore).
If you want more partitions for windoz, do it later, when you boot in that OS (if you want them to be primary and follow the 1st one) from XP's disk management.
Then, install the linux distros you want, one by one. Partitioning & formatting linux partitions, could be done either by the partition tool in the installer (like Drak),
or with a GParted Live CD (of course, there are more ways to do it).
Just remember to install GRUB of your "favorite/primary" Linux distribution in sda (not anywhere else) so it could overwrite the XP's MBR.
And the GRUB of all the other distros in their root partition / (not in sda).
Then, chainload the GRUBs, from the one in sda to the other. (I've allready wrote in a previous post how to do that).
That way, it's very "difficult" to make a mistake.
Everything should be fine.

[omelette]

Sorry, I almost missed this. Thanks for the info. Yes, Image For DOS was originally M$ based but there is also a version for Linux available. The thing I like about it is its size - it's a miserly 1.4meg but still is GUI-based, has compression and can write to DVD etc. basically loads of features! The Linux version is a lot bigger for some reason (30meg if I recall correctly). Wanting to be 100% Linux-based I downloaded it and ended up paying the price - it scrambled the drive I was trying to backup completely, due to a bug of some kind! I ended up having to just format the drive as nothing on the 'Hiren' rescue cd could recover any of it! Just prior to it happening, I had posted a number of times on his forum, pointing out as politely as I could that there was a problem with the Linux version - yet I continued using it and lost the lot!!! The M$ version seems rock-solid though, I've been using it for years. He obviously puts more effort into the DOS version.

I jumped ship on M$ about 5 years ago and will never go back! Everything after XP is a mystery to me as I've never used them. I was just shoving XP on the old computer to fill a slot, with no real intention of using it. Regarding Gparted, I didn't just format the drive, I first deleted all the partitions, then with the whole disk listed as "Unallocated" I partitioned & formatted that! And that apparently was not enough as NONE of the Windoze I tried - 98, 2k & XP - would continue the install after the first reboot! One interesting thing was that one of the partitioning apps from the Hiren CD warned that the disk might not be bootable as it 'overlapped' cylinders or some-such - can't remember exactly.

I'll might have another go at installing Mageia on the hopefully now-fixed hard-drive, this time writing the boot-loader to the install-partition - just to see if it works, as it didn't the last two times!