Installation Failed for Both v3.1 Gnome and v3.1 Lxde

[motsteve]

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not a Newbee except to GhostBSD. I've done dozens and dozens of installs to VM's and to drives. I love trying out as many distro's as I can. My favorite tool once in a distro is the terminal. I have a highly multiple boot system consisting now of Windoz 7, Mint 13, Mint 15, FreeBSD 9.1, NetBSD 5.1, and Ubuntu 13.04. This last listing is one of my minimums as far as variety of distos goes. Let me say right now that GhostBSD has one of the nicest installers I've ever come across. However, I've tried to install GhostBSD 5.1 on a hard drive partition using Gnome and Lxde versions on both VM's and my main CPU and the installation in all cases ends in failure.

When I boot the CD or the DVD I notice that there is no verification of the media pick in the menu, but I've never ever had a failure due to bad media anyway, so I would assume that both of these media are good. The boot to desktop goes very smoothly. When I get into the installer everything goes well, but since I have a multiboot system, I must go the route of specifying my partitioning. I choose the customization menu pick and go in and create a FreeBSD partition on one of my disks with some space and give GhostBSD 5G of space. I then create the new partition and then hit the next button. The system then just sits and sits even after 45 minutes. In my VM's case there's an error message saying that there is no drive found even though, in this case, I left the installer in autopilot to partition the drive even though it found the drive during the hardware check.

I find the FreeBSD 9.1 system to be quite nice even though my main use is in Mint 13. I really would like to see my machine booting both Linux and Unix and running smoothly. It appears that this installer has a problem with my drive system. I do have a mixture of SATA and IDE (one drive).

I am familiar with the normal system files such as dmesg, syslog, etc, so just let me know what you need. I just need some time to gather the info, so my response my seem a little long in coming. I don't mind the troubleshooting, in fact this is a good way to bring out any other problems.


i7 CPU (2.67MHz 920), 6G ram, (5) hard drives, GPU=nVidia Geforce 9800GT, mobo Asus P6T (non-UEFI)

P.S. As an aside, I tried the installer disk in my eeePC 701 and it booted up to a point and then got into a menu where it couldn't find the boot drive. Heck! I thought the boot drive was the ### CD I was booting on! Once again, it isn't finding my drives on either machine.


Steve

[bsdkeith]

Hi Steve, there has been some troubles with the installer only wanting to take over a disk.

I did manage to get it installed to its own slice of my disk, but it wasn't intuative. I had to create the slice & then go back to the previous menu, change to the middle item, & then go forward again, & that got it to install.

There is a new version 3.5 Beta, which is supposed to have addressed this problem, as yet, I haven't got around to trying it.
Perhaps you would like to download & test it, at the moment it is an XFCE desktop, with Mate & Openbox to follow, if all goes well.

Hope this is of some help to you, all the best.

[motsteve]

Thanks Fatmac,

I'm guessing that the previous menu is the one to pick "use entire disk", something or other, and then "customize". I'll take a look and then try it out if that looks achievable. I'll let you know my results.

Steve

[motsteve]

Fatmac,

It failed, but at least it got further along before doing so. It apparently doesn't like my size specified. That seems odd. Here is the pc-sysinstall.log output:

Code: Select all

Trying DHCP on msk0  <Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Yukon EC Ultra Id 0xb4 Rev 0x03>
kern.geom.debugflags: 0 -> 16
Running gpart modify on /dev/ada1
Running: gpart modify -t freebsd -i 4 /dev/ada1
ada1s4 modified
Cleaning up /dev/ada1s4
Running: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1s4 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
524288 bytes transferred in 0.173336 secs (3024691 bytes/sec)
Running: gpart create -s BSD /dev/ada1s4
ada1s4 created
EXITERROR: ERROR: The size specified on disk0-part=UFS+SUJ -1118 / is invalid

It partitions the right partition and executes the dd command and then it decides the "size specified" is incorrect. The size I specified was 5000 MBytes, if that is the "size specified".

BTW, it was a good thing I remembered how to do a "scp" command because that is how I transfered the temp file to my other host, a Mac. I love Linux, but I've have yet to get used to Unix.

Steve

[ericbsd]

Hi motsteve,

In VM a lot of time it fail due to a lack CPU power. And what is the Machine you Try to Install it?

[motsteve]

I have a 2.67 GHz i7 (920) with 6G of ram.

Steve

[ericbsd]

It should work flawlessly, but some time it just failed the worst GhostBSD installer use the same back end of PC-BSD.
And most of the time it what failed on GhostBSD doesn't fail on PC-BSD.

[motsteve]

Okay. I'll try that, but I would like to find out why it failed installation to the hard drive.

Thanks,

Steve