I have successfully installed Mageia 3 and Mageia 4 previously. Installation on a; (which I use as a desktop) IBM xSeries 206m - Server, 64 Bit processor and 1GB of DRAM. There is a BIOS warning at start-up associated with the PCI soundcard. With either Hard disk; (they are known reliable) IDE 40GB with 162 bad sectors IDE 20GB with 0 bad sectors. 0r SATA 250GB number of bad sectors unknown but likely to be not many. Prepared the USB stick using; Rufus then windows format that USB stick then put the iso on the USB stick using openSUSE image writer (Rufus will do that as well) but I know openSUSE works. I have also successfully installed using Linux Mint ImageWriter. Both Full 64 bit and the DualArch installation have failed and have been successful. Booting the USB stick installation; I use a USB boot tool placed on a floppy disk; http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html ** THERE IS A PROBLEM and a clue ** If I eject the floppy disk after the installation has booted the installation can be successful. But if I leave the floppy disk inserted installation warns that the partition table can not be read and invites me to accept the risk and proceed. The installation then fails just after the partitioning completes. ** THE PROBLEM with the floppy disk ejected after booting installation successfully ** If the installation fails once again The failure is once again just after the partitions were created. I am not sure of the message, which changed a little on each of my attempts to install but it was something like Sdb6 or Sbc with a code number suggesting a problem with partition. This is the problem the installation should be on sba. But I found a work arround. ** THE WORK ARROUND ** On investigation the correct partitions had been created on the hard disk. But there was also a Ext2 and an Ext4 partition created on the USB stick's spare space. The solution was to delete those created partitions on the USB stick. I also created a FAT32 partition in the space on the USB stick and the installation proceeded successfully. Other observations; * The number of Bad sectors on the hard disk is not relevant. * Mageia 3, 4 full or Arch installation is not relevant. * What was on the hard disk and whether it is shared with another OS is not relevant. (Linux Mint or Windows XP) * It IS RELEVANT that the Linux installation USB stick had additional Linux partitions on it. I SPECULATE that these inappropriately created partitions were created the first time that I used the memory stick to install Mageia irrespective of whether that first installation was successful. * Successful installation occurred with USB floppy is plugged into the first found USB port and the memory stick plugged into the other port. This may not be relevant.
URL: (none) => https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7228
I have had cause to reinstall Mageia again and I found; My last coment about about which USB port the floppy disk drive and the USB memory was plugged into. It does not matter. There was no susbequent problem with installation so I think once the spare space on the memory stick was filled with a FAT32 partition the problem did not arrise again.
so you can reproduce or not ?
I think it is reproducible but I will have to test this again to be sure. Incidentally - have tried installing Mageia on to another USB stick (instead of a hard disk) unsuccessfully the installation failed at the point of partition creation. It will be be a little while before I have retried installing to a hard disk I will return to this bug report when I have.
(In reply to Manuel Hiebel from comment #2) > so you can reproduce or not ? I think it is reproducible but I will have to test this again to be sure. Incidentally - have tried installing Mageia on to another USB stick (instead of a hard disk) unsuccessfully the installation failed at the point of partition creation. It will be be a little while before I have retried installing to a hard disk I will return to this bug report when I have.
I have been able to get the problem to re-occur. I think it happens when their is a problem with the hard disk which in some way causes a Linux partition to be created the installation USB in the spare space on that memory stick. I believe I created the USB image using openSUSE ImageWriter on windows XP. Mageia 4.1 was created successfully a number of times with this USB dual-arc installer USB. Note; isoDumper on Mageia 4, Rufus or openSUSE ImageWriter on windows XP all leave part of the usb stick space unallocated. So I don't think which tool used is relevant. They all install Mageia fine. Although the problem I reported was with the dual-arch 4.0 I have also tried the 64 bit full installation version. If I leave the boot floppy disk in the drive after the screen with red writing on blue background appears (this is the point that that boot floppy can be removed) there is a warning later with a yes/no question about partitions and proceeding could loose data. It does not matter which way the question is answered no problem arises either way and the USB installer can be used again later as well. I have in addition tried the 32 bit KDE 4.1 LiveCD version. I had not used this version before. There is no warning arising from leaving my boot floppy disk inserted. You can imagine a spent a number of days on this and I got quite tired when the problem occurred. I tried installing to a SATA drive I had been installing to a IDE hard disk. My PC is a server and has four RAID/SATA slots. The dual-arch installer offered me select RAID (not knowing what this will do) I selected YES this was the point where I could not install or update to the, in this case, already created Linux partitions. On examining the partitions on the USB stick I found a partly created extended Linux partition on that memory stick. After that extra partition was removed, thereby restoring the USB to as it was it looked like is was going to work fine (I will recheck that point). It was necessary to restore my pc and my windows XP installation disk did that. by deleting and creating new partitions. I then GParted to create a correctly sized ntfs partition (that was my computer back up lost unfortunately so I put backup of my work on the disk again) I briefly ran Windows XP to check and correct the disk before proceeding to install Mageia on part of the disk. I used the LiveCD USB to put back KDE then change it to XFCE. I have not checked the dual-arch installer (I will try that and post again but it should be fine)
I have installed Mageia 4.1 a number of times since successfully on the same computer. The event is rare but it happened again but for no apparent reason (like the other times) but looking back I found the disk with Windows XP partition had a fault and is unreadable by GParted though otherwise all partitions on that disk are fine and windows Chkdsk check the NTFS partition successfully. In other words still no clearly repeated set of events. In this case no clear cause and effect the disk problem may have occurred separate after the installation problem rather than have caused it.
If someone can reproduce the bug, when the error occurs, do not reboot, but rather plug an usb stick in, type Ctrl+Alt+F2 and then type "bug". This should copy a file called report.bug to the usb stick, that you can then attach to the bug report for helping us to debug the issue. If in a few months from now no one could provide debug information, then we'll probably have to close this bug report since we can't work on it.
Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO
I hope the problem is resolved in due cause but I am not using Mageia now. Thanks for your support for creating one of the best distributions.
Status: NEW => RESOLVEDResolution: (none) => WORKSFORME