Description of problem: Dell Laptop Turn off the SATA channel in BIOS enable USB boot Plug into a USB port: Mageia-8-alpha1-Live-Plasma-x86_64.iso bf47a72f923a915a561c410349690f31 06/22/20 or Mageia-8-alpha1-x86_64.iso ceec76764dc08ff68fc1c2909e7086e2 06/22/20 Boot to a desktop install menus with the Live-DVD or CI menus Plug a fat32 formatted 128GB USB in another USB port Dolphin sees the 128GB USB drive ( Live-DVD ) So now you have a Live-DVD live desktop and a blank usb drive There is no SATA HD Start the install process. Almost immediately the following error is displayed: An error occured Can't call method "first_usable_sector" on unblessed reference. Your never asked what the target of the install is. I don't think you need a working SATA drive to execute an install. I've done usb only installs many times before.
Thanks for the report, Bill. It seems weird installing to a USB; does it end up as a 'live' system? > I've done usb only installs many times before Assigning to Mageia tools for Installer, CC the ISO team.
CC: (none) => isobuildAssignee: bugsquad => mageiatools
(In reply to Lewis Smith from comment #1) > It seems weird installing to a USB; does it end up as a 'live' system? To answer your question directly installing from a Live media, CI or even a netinstall all really end up in the same place. That's what I have seen through the many versions of Mageia.
My guess from the error would be that it is upset that there is no partition table, but usually FAT32 formatted USB keys have one with a single partition. Can you check if the USB key has some partition or the whole key is formatted as FAT32? Actually, are you sure this is FAT32? I thought FAT32 could not be larger than 32GB and usually things use EXFAT for larger volumes.
CC: (none) => pterjan
(In reply to Pascal Terjan from comment #3) > My guess from the error would be that it is upset that there is no partition > table... Thanks Pascal. I continue to test this issue even though I seem to have found a fix. See the following Comment
Further testing today I found that starting with a completely blank USB drive cleared this error. If you use Gparted one of the format options is "cleared". That seems to have prevented the "An error occured....." message and the install continued normally.
Thanks, we should still fix it but it confirms it didn't like how the key was formatted
Successful USB install here using a Gparted "cleared" 128GB USB drive and: Mageia-Cauldron-netinstall-x86_64.iso The resulting USB drive successfully booted to a working Xfce desktop. The DE was fully usable. The primary drive on the 2020 Dell Laptop is a 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD that is formatted to run Windows 10. With the bootable M6 Xfce USB drive inserted into a USB port at boot and repeatedly depressing F12 to get you to the boot menu you can select either Win10 or Mageia M8 Xfce. If you do not call the boot menu ( F12 ) the laptop defaults to booting Windows 10. The USB flash drive I'm using is a Samsung FIT Plus USB 3.1 Flash Drive 128GB. The USB Port is 3.1. Performance is quite impressive.
Trying to reproduce with a disk, it even got worse :( [root@mageia drakx (master)]# mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) [root@mageia drakx (master)]# diskdrake Can't locate partition_table/loop.pm in @INC (you may need to install the partition_table::loop module) (@INC contains: /usr/lib/libDrakX /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5/5.32 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5) at /usr/lib/libDrakX/partition_table.pm line 287. Perl's trace: drakbug::bug_handler() called from /usr/lib/libDrakX/partition_table.pm:287 partition_table::initialize() called from /usr/lib/libDrakX/partition_table/raw.pm:227 partition_table::raw::zero_MBR() called from /usr/lib/libDrakX/fsedit.pm:265 fsedit::get_hds() called from /usr/libexec/diskdrake:74 Looking at the code, "loop" is what libparted gives us when there is directly a file system without a partition table, we should handle that but that also means this was not your problem as you got a different error.
I have committed a fix for my problem (https://gitweb.mageia.org/software/drakx/commit/?id=429fded33a34ff63e37af5c32aa5f7f9b38e052c) but still don't know what is causing yours :(
(In reply to Pascal Terjan from comment #9) > but still don't know what is > causing yours :( My biggest worry was during the Magiea install from whatever media that when writing boot that would blow up the Win 10 on the internal 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. Turning that off in the BIOS really truly turned it off and the Mageia install never sees it. Whew!
CC: (none) => fri