[26263] in Athena Bugs
Re: Linux-Athena installer improperly created partitions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin Chen)
Thu Dec 23 22:18:20 2004
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:17:44 -0500 (EST)
From: Kevin Chen <kchen@mit.edu>
To: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200412221551.iBMFpfIa024554@pothole.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58L.0412232214420.14599@scyther.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
cc: bugs@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, andrew m. boardman wrote:
> >After not doing anything at "Installing RPMs" for about 15 minutes, we
> >rebooted.
>
> This, unfortunately, is a fact of life. At this point, the installation
> needs to scan the RPM headers for the entire release (to build a
> dependency tree), and given the size of the release and a potentially
> slow network and/or CPU, it can take quite a while; 15 minutes is
> definitely not unheard-of, and I've seen it take hours. What sort of
> machine was this?
As it turns out, it seems that the computer actually froze at this point.
It seems that the computer has some issues possibly related to heat.
(It's a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz machine with 256 MB of RAM.) The user had
recently built it himself, and it has had some other freezing problems.
> [The old Windows partition is gone, but the installer hasn't overwritten
> the relevant part of the disk, instead creating linux partitions after it.]
>
> That's really poor. Do you have any idea what the partition number and
> numerical partition type was before the install, and can you tell me what
> you recreated it as? (In an ideal easily-debuggable world, the output of
> "sfdisk -d -uS /dev/hda" (or whatever disk applies) and the contents of
> /proc/partitions and /tmp/partitioning.old would be handy in figuring out
> what went wrong.)
I'll try to take a look at this when I get back to campus in about a week.
--
Kevin Chen
http://www.sneswhiz.com/
