Failed Fedora 11 attempt

After Debian failed and Ubuntu failed to install and Gentoo required way too much of my time, in a way that is also "failing" to install, I am now giving Fedora a shot. Previously I have tried CentOS on a server and have been happy with it, it just runs Xen troublefree.

I want the 64 bit version, and I find a torrent on the fedoraproject.org site. I didn't know I had a torrent downloader on my Mac, but it seems that the Opera browser has one built in. Very nice.

Booting shows a black screen, with a white line growing at the bottom. More white line fever. However soon it seems nicer, it starts a good looking X-session. I get a message a hard disk is failing as a speech bubble at the top right of the screen. When I click it I get the palimpset disk utility. It seems the 160gb drive has bad sectors. I can select self-test to do an ATA SMART self test, I choose a short test. It seems OK but it has some bad sectors. I have just fixed a bad disk using ddrescue so I know how to fix it some day, I will blog about it soon.

Anyway, the palimpset disk utility seems nice, I can see my disks even the LVM ones.

I click on the Install to Hard Drive icon on the screen. This is not a text based installer as I have tried earlier. It is a graphical "wizard" resembling Windows and Mac OS. It feels refreshing after the Gentoo experience. Choosing my location is nice, just click on the world map.

It complains about a weak password, but lets me continue anyway. That is nice.

Now I get the option to partion the hard drive. One option is "Replace existing Linux system". Wonder what that means? Reformat everything including /home or just overwrite system files? I select it and review and modify partioning layout. Ok, it seems it meant blow everything because they have a slightly other LVM setup and want to install ext4 on it. I go back.

Now I choose a "Custom layout", and see my discs. I have to scroll up and down to see my whole setup, but I can select sdc, then click edit and select /boot as mount point.
I then click on my vg1/root device, click edit. I don't see how to select a mount point. But, if I click on the "root" part in the list of logical volumes in the popup window, I can select / as mount point. I then get a long warning about using a pre-existing partition without formatting it. But, they also say "However, if this partition contains files that you need to keep such as home directories, then continue without formatting this partition". Thanks for this, it seems I am not the first one seeing this need.

I now have a xfs lvm root and an ext3 boot, that is good enough, the other disk I might add later or mount manually. I click continue.

Then I get the message: your / partition does not match the live image you are installing from. It must be formatted as ext4. Damn! My guess is that they haven't support for xfs on the live-cd. But, I feel fedora is promising, so I download the 4Gb DVD instead. Maybe it is more complete?

Now, the DVD installer didn't complain about XFS. I select to have the bootloader on the /boot partition. I deselect "Office and productivity", trying to start with as small install as possible, then see what I want to add later.

Finally it is time for reboot. I think this will work...

No. Just a black screen, no choice of loading linux (grub or lilo). Can it be that I selected the boot disk for the bootloader? I will try another install using the default Fedora suggested, on sda1.

No that didn't work. I mess around with different start disks too no help.

Now, I try yet another time. This time I select to reformat my little 94 MB sda1 partition (no mount point) and also the sdc1 (/boot mount). And the 2 Gb swap I have on LVM.
Now I notice that the boot loader device option also list the boot order I just selected in Bios. And I can change it! I select the Master boot record of dev/sdc, select sdc as the first BIOS drive. Thats the 80GB ext3 boot disk I want.

I also notice I can Edit the Boot loader, so for the first time I press edit. And an Exception shows in Anaconda. I even have the option to send it to redhat. But they require an account, so they won't get my exception. I thought this information could be interesting even if I was anonymous.

It seems I need to restart the installer again. But I wasn't really interested in changing The boot loader menu name so I will give it one more try. This is the last attempt before I try Open Solaris. It have taken more than a day now.

Ok. It failed. The exception is in /usr/lib/anaconda/booty/x86.py line 154 in writeGrub. IOError: no such file or directory /mnt/sysimage/boot/grub/grub.conf

But OpenSolaris doens't support xfs. So I give Fedora one more try. This time it really seems that it doesn't pick up the boot order I just selected in BIOS. Anyway, I install it as MBR on sda. Then I will change boot order in bios. But the installer crashes yet another time. This time it is time to give up. I see no good option. Maybe it is time to wrestle with Gentoo. Or buy a big harddrive and dump my home directory, it should be readable from a live-CD.