FS#13610 - Installing from USB flash drive stalls.
Attached to Project:
Release Engineering
Opened by Simon Morgan (sjmorgan) - Sunday, 01 March 2009, 15:35 GMT
Last edited by Gerhard Brauer (GerBra) - Thursday, 30 July 2009, 06:41 GMT
Opened by Simon Morgan (sjmorgan) - Sunday, 01 March 2009, 15:35 GMT
Last edited by Gerhard Brauer (GerBra) - Thursday, 30 July 2009, 06:41 GMT
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Details
I wrote the image to my USB flash drive using the
instructions on the wiki (dd bs=8M if=image.img of=/dev/sde)
after which the filesystem looked like this:
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sde Disk /dev/sde: 1000 MB, 1000341504 bytes 171 heads, 23 sectors/track, 496 cylinders Units = cylinders of 3933 * 512 = 2013696 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sde1 * 1 85 165985 83 Linux Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 2, 18) Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(20, 170, 23) logical=(84, 72, 5) I booted from the drive using the default (top) GRUB menu entry. The kernel began booting. It got to a point where it said it was scanning for USB drives, printed out some messages about mounting ext3 filesystems as ext2 (sda1 and sb1, I think) and then an error about failing to mount the (I think) root filesystem and switching to interactive mode. It then printed the same kind of stuff I get when plugging the USB drive into my Ubuntu installation ("sd 6:0:0:0: [sde] 1953792 512-byte hardware sectors (1000 MB)" etc.) and stalled with the cursor sitting there blinking. It did not switch to interactive mode as it said. The keyboard was unresponsive and I had to reset the machine. |
This task depends upon
Closed by Gerhard Brauer (GerBra)
Thursday, 30 July 2009, 06:41 GMT
Reason for closing: Fixed
Additional comments about closing: Since 2009.08-beta1 we use a new methode for detecting the boot device.
USB delaying is no more necessary.
Thursday, 30 July 2009, 06:41 GMT
Reason for closing: Fixed
Additional comments about closing: Since 2009.08-beta1 we use a new methode for detecting the boot device.
USB delaying is no more necessary.
For the boot problem: edit the grub boot entry and increase the usbdelay bootparameter (default 5) to somewhat like 15. Maybe your USB subsystem needs a longer period to settle down.
Or copy the image again with dd (you could try it without the bs=8M parameter, only writing with if= and of= is enough).
I tried writing the image without the bs parameter as well as increasing the bootdelay, but it made no difference.
The warning it gives (for two of my partitions, sda1 and sdb1) is "ext2_super_fill: mounting ext3 filesystem as ext2". The error is "ERROR: cannot find boot device, cannot continue...".
It might be interesting to know that the details of the USB flash drive ("sd 6:0:0:0: [sde] 1953792 512-byte hardware sectors (1000 MB)" etc.) only appear after the amount of time specified by usbdelay (whether it's 5 or 15) and after the error about not being able to find the boot device. As if it's only accessing it after everything has failed, despite the fact that it's the device I'm booting from.
Could you try a other usb stick and/or the same stick on another PC? Meanwhile (if you want get a installation) it's maybe better to use a CD ISO...
See also
FS#13053Simon: could you (as already mentioned) test this stick on other PCs? Also try on your PC: increase the usbdelay value to something like 45. Have you an PS/2 keyboard you could attach to have a keyboard when stucking in initramfs shell? Another Tip: if you have other extern devices (usb cdroms, harddisks or whatever) attached during boot, could you unplug as many devices as possible not needed to install the system? To reduce the count of devices getting scanned for the archiso files.
Also try my tip with changing the boot order in BIOS...
My BIOS doesn't seem to have any settings relating to bus order; you just configure a numbered list of devices for each bus (IDE, SATA, USB) and then you can choose the boot order from the #1 device in each of those lists.