The issue tracker has been moved https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archiso/-/issues
FS#23402 - AIF installator is unfortunatelly limited to only /dev/sda* disks.
Attached to Project:
Release Engineering
Opened by Peter Slížik (peter.slizik) - Wednesday, 23 March 2011, 11:12 GMT
Last edited by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Tuesday, 09 August 2011, 14:02 GMT
Opened by Peter Slížik (peter.slizik) - Wednesday, 23 March 2011, 11:12 GMT
Last edited by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Tuesday, 09 August 2011, 14:02 GMT
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DetailsDear developers,
I bought a new SD-card to install Arch Linux on. (The reason is my laptop supports only one internal harddrive and I need to keep the Windows installation intact.) In AIF, step 3 (Prepare Hard Drives) I chose 2 (Manually Partition Hard Drives). Here, AIF offered me only /dev/sda, so I chose 'OTHER' and typed in '/dev/mmcblk0'. I created the partition table on the card and moved on to the next step, Manually Configure block devices, filesystems and mountpoints. Here I was offered to choose from 'dev', 'label' and 'uuid'. However, all of these options allowed me to choose only from '/dev/sda*' disks, and there is no 'OTHER' options. I can naturally format the card manually from another console, but I suspect it's not possible to tell AIF that I want my new root on '/dev/mmcblk0'. Please, add the 'OTHER' option to 'Manually Configure block devices, filesystems and mountpoints'. Thank you very much. |
This task depends upon
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_Existing_Linux
I'm putting the link here for other people if they happen to stumble upon this issue. I'll try the iso you provided as soon as I have the opportunity.
First, AIF detects my SD card without any problems; thank you for the work you put into this. Now the problems: I came through the process a few times and didn't finish it even once, for various reasons. First, I tried to partition the card manually, I also created the filesystem manually - no problems here. However, in the second run I chose Automatic Partitioning (I left all options on their default values) and AIF stopped with this message: "Warning: Could not create all needed filesystems. Either the underlying block devices didn't became available in 10 iterations, or process_filesystem failed." I don't know what caused this error, I can debug it for you if you give me the instructions. There's also a minor spelling mistake, "didn't became" should be "didn't become".
Now, here are a few observations I made:
When in the process of manually creating the file systems, I chose /dev/mmcblk0p1. Then I hit something I wasn't sure about, so I returned back to the menu and selected /dev/mmcblk0p1 again. AIF asked me this question: "Change filesystem settings on /dev/mmcblk0p1 ?" Now I was left with two possibilities:
edit ... EDIT
delete ... DELETE
With my best effort I had very hard time what is to be edited or deleted here. I understand it's pretty clear to you as a developer, but you need to lower your standards when you speak to ordinary users (like me) and phrase the messages more eloquently.
This is a minor point, but let me go: When I partitioned the card and created filesystems, AIF warned me that I didn't have separate /boot and swap partitions. I believe this check should be left out, or at least the message rephrased when dealing with SD/MMC cards and USB flash disks. Usually people don't use swap on flash media to prevent wear and prolong its life.
I hope this helped a bit. As I wrote, I wasn't lucky enough to finish the installation yet, so I may have other comments later.
* if you did a run successfully first, you need to rollback before you can do another run ( if AIF set up stuff before) (as described in the installation guide)
* or.. If you set up stuff manually (like you said you did) you of course need to umount the filesystems so that device is not busy. AIF cannot do its job on devices that are busy.
as for the "edit" vs "delete", if this bothers you much you can create a new ticket for that specific issue. (one ticket per issue)