Bug 6407

Summary:	Mageia 2.0 Live won't boot
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Philip Webb <purslow>
Component:	Installer	Assignee:	Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	major
Priority:	Normal	CC:	davidwhodgins
Version:	2
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i586
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:	Mageia-2-LiveCD-KDE4-Europe1-Americas-i586-CD.iso	CVE:
Status comment:

Description Philip Webb 2012-06-11 00:02:24 CEST

Description of problem:

I downloaded the ISO above, wrote it to a USB stick with Unetbootin
& booted from it : the boot starts, then displays a list of numbers,
then asks "(1) Copy original to backup ... "; whatever I reply,
it asks "Free cluster summary wrong ... Correct or not ? " --
whatever I reply, the result is "dracut warning: fsck returned with 1,
/sysroot has no proper rootfs layout, removing offending mount hook,
cannot mount root fs, dropping to debug shell; dracut:/ #".
I've tried all permutations, but the result is always the same.
This is the 3rd ISO I've downloaded with the same result.

I'm a Gentoo user, but previously (2003) used Mandrake
& would like to have Mageia installed to show friends etc.
There seems to be something wrong with the ISO :
is there perhaps some boot flag which I can set ?

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible: download ISO, go through usual steps

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1 Dave Hodgins 2012-06-11 04:00:30 CEST

Most likely it's a problem with using Unetbootin to copy it to the stick.

Try "dd if=Mageia-2-LiveCD-KDE4-Europe1-Americas-i586-CD.iso of=/dev/sd? bs=1M".

Run the dd command as root, in the directory the iso image is stored in,
replacing /dev/sd? with the correct device.

The iso images are already hyrbid images, so they can boot after being
copied to a stick, or burned to a physical cd.

CC: (none) => davidwhodgins

Comment 2 Philip Webb 2012-06-12 01:16:40 CEST

Thanks for your prompt advice, which is correct.  I had to delete the existing partitions on the USB stick & 'dd' the ISO onto the unformatted state,
but it did then boot & I was able to go thro' the install process.
Perhaps a note would be justified on the Mageia site warning not to use Unetbootin to write the ISO to USB.

My one serious complaint is that there's no option offered not to overwrite the MBR, but I got to the "finish" step & cancelled.  The result was that everything had been copied to the partition & I could copy the boot files to my Gentoo /boot directory & include them in  lilo.conf .  Otherwise, I would have had to hope that I could use SystemRescue to recover control of the boot process.

After a small problem adding the 'nokmsboot' option & having it stall to download some update, a reboot got everything working, incl networking !

Generally, I'm impressed with the user-friendly but basically serious approach
& hope Mageia can finally get the old Mandrake distro restored on a lasting community basis.  So far, so good !

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => FIXED

Comment 3 Dave Hodgins 2012-06-12 03:42:30 CEST

(In reply to comment #2)
> Perhaps a note would be justified on the Mageia site warning not to use
> Unetbootin to write the ISO to USB.

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation_Media#Dump_Mageia_ISOs_on_a_USB_stick.3F

I've modified the notes.  Thanks for the suggestion.
 
> My one serious complaint is that there's no option offered not to overwrite the
> MBR, but I got to the "finish" step & cancelled.  The result was that

I agree that it isn't clear enough, but it is there.  During the
summary step, if you select the option to configure the boot loader,
you can change the destination from the default of the mbr, to
the filesystem or drive of your choice.

The bootloader doesn't actually get written until after the summary
step has been completed.