Re: AC 3 install failures - PWS500au

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On Mar 10, 2007, at 23:40, Ken Raeburn wrote:
AC3 came out just in time for me to be reinstalling a couple of the test machines at work.

[... AlphaStation 400 stuff omitted ...]

On another machine (PWS500au, only 128M RAM) it started up okay, but when it got to "Installation Starting" ("Starting install process. This may take several minutes..."), it crunched for a while, displayed "install exited abnormally", and went through the same shutdown sequence. No messages were displayed about why it exited, and root/install.log is empty.

Any suggestions?

I've finally gotten around to dealing with this machine again.

Sergey Tikhonov suggested checking other virtual consoles. Jay Estabrook suggested I try to get my hands on more memory.

I did get my hands on some more memory from another machine. (I figure, worst case, I install with gobs of memory and then put the other memory back, and see if I can run an already-installed system with only the 128M.)

First thing I tried was the Debian installer, since I didn't recall if I'd tried that on the PWS before; my email had only mentioned trying it on the AlphaStation. With the extra memory, at least, that seemed to run fine, at least far enough to finish the first pass of installation, eject the CD, and reboot. So I went to retry the AC3 install, and remembered I should check for more info logged anywhere with just the 128M, so I pulled out the extra memory and booted the AC3 CD.

This time, it seems to be working somewhat better.

It has, a couple of times, seemed to freeze up partway through the installation of packages. The installer display stops changing, and the disk seek noise has stopped, for 10 minutes or more. But if I switch VCs and run "top" or something at the shell prompt, that seems to prod it into activity; the disk noises, at least, start up again right away. I can quit top and go back to the installer virtual console, and it's moving on to other packages.

It got as far as starting on the second CD before giving me "install exited abnormally".

So I checked the different VCs (couldn't run any commands because the OS has shut down), and found some stuff logged by the kernel:

<6>SELinux: initialized (dev hda, type iso9660) uses genfs_contexts
<6>sd 0:0:1:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
<6>sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
<6> Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - recommend rewrite the data
<6>Info fld=0x10bb9f0
<4>end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 17545712

So, it appears I've got some kind of disk problem on the disk I'm installing to, and the install system hides it from me.

I think at this point it was still running from the file system pulled from the CD, not running code from the hard drive. If that's true, it would've just been an error reading or writing data in the install process that isn't handled properly, rather than an error loading pages of the executable image, which might cause the process to simply be killed...

Ken


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