Bugzilla – Bug 60128
install from a windows partition
Last modified: 2007-06-06 20:08:37 UTC
Installation from a windows partition did not work. The first CD was OK. Then came a reboot to continue installation, but Yast could not found the installation source. I guess, the problem is, that installation sources are already were mounted under /windows/d, so Yast could not mount it.
<!-- SBZ_reproduce --> Install from a windows partition.
Anas, you seem to know that mechanism - please explain how this is supposed to work.
Well, I know it works to start installation from an existing partition, It actually has nothing to do with windows and can happen with any partition. linuxrc mounts the specified partition and yast2 installs from the partition. after first stage is done, yast2 cant find the location because it stored the original location and now this new partition is mounted somewhere else (eg. /data1 or /windows/C...). So pkg manager somehow needs to change the source to the new mount point.
So that information needs to be propagated from linuxrc to the package manager (or to the inst_target YCP code) and then that status needs to be restored in after rebooting. Andreas, is this a supported / promised feature at all? This looks like some work might be required to get this working. I wonder how this feature made it into the installation without any of us being involved, much less informed. This looks more like yet another "guerilla" feature to me that was introduced at one point where it was easy, completely disregarding the follow-up cost. :-( Please make a decision and reassign back to component owner for further processing.
First time I hear about this ;-). Is this needed for UML? Please get this into the feature document so that it works for future products.
What is the use case for this? So far, nobody could come up with an explanation why on earth we should need yet another installation mode that needs to be tested and maintained all the time. And no, saving the trouble of burning the whole downloaded set of CDs is no use case we will acknowledge. You can install via network (FTP, HTTP, SMB) from an installation server - this is a use case that makes sense in a large organization. If you only have one machine, however, this does not make sense - it only adds to the confusion and to our workload, and, even worse, to the recurring maintenance cost when we make new distributions. This feature had made sense back in the early 1990s when some CD-ROMs had required weird MS-DOS only drivers and thus were unavailable under Linux, but IMHO it does not make any sense whatsoever today. Who came up with this? Who half-implemented the first part of this so we now have yet another set of problems we really don't need? And worse, who didn't think far enough that this would simply break only after CD1 like described in this bug (and in another related one)?
Installation from partition has always been supported. I really don't see why you're so upset just because someone found a bug in it.
In my case, I did not have time to burn CD-s. But at our university (one of the largests in Hungary) there are still a lot of computers without a CD-ROM drive. Researchers are on a very tight budget, and if they can decide, they buy 128M more RAM instead of a CD-ROM. To copy the content of CD-s over the network form one Windows machine to the other requiers much less knowledge and preparation, than an ftp/http/smb install. If hacking Yast2/linuxrc is not an option, a "Warning" in the "Admin guide" would be also sufficient, I think. Something like this would do it: "If you installing from an existing partition, please make sure, that it is not formatted during the installation process or mounted automatically afterwards. Use 'advanced partitioning', as described on page XX".
snwint: Funny thing then that nobody ever found that it never worked. I am strictly against half-assed attempts at features that have no real-world usage, even less so if they add to our work load without real benefits.
Peter: If you have a network, it's very easy to set up an installation server for just this purpose. This is an use case that makes real sense, one that works, one that is supported. We even have a YaST2 module to set up the installation server. On the client side, it's MUCH easier to do a network installation than any fiddling with coexistent partitions. If you set up the installation server to do SLP, it's even easier. You only have to tell your users "select SLP installation from the installation boot menu" - that's it. Bottom line: We don't support that installation mode. Please use the alternatives that exist and work well. Steffen, please remove that option - it is more harmful than helpful, as this example shows.
See also bug 47279
I'm not going to remove that option just because yast suddenly feels bad about it.
No, because it DOES NOT WORK - by design.
Some people seem to have been able to install this way in the past. So it can't be that bad.
How do you do the switching to CD2..CD5? Even if you try to mount manually, you will have a hard time being fast enough to switch to a text console and issue the correct mount command before the package manager backend realizes the installation source is unavailable.
IIRC it's identical to a network install. Just put the whole tree on a local disk instead of a network server. Where comes CD2 into play?
After rebooting when any old mounts are gone. At some point, that partition would have to be mounted again to the same mount point as before - but that doesn't happen. See comment #1.
Isn't yast supposed to install everything before the reboot, if possible?
Not having to reboot would be nice, then this problem would not exist et all. I just made a complett FAT32 based install for Stefan (sh@), it works perfectly, if I use fstab option "noauto" for the source partition. 6G of packages without any problems :) Btw: I know how to create a network install source (10+ years in the Linux/FreeBSD/Cisco business...). But not all people contact the IT department before installing (those are the rare exeptions...), and for those a partition based install is much easier, than setting up everything for a network install. And for beta testing, and other CD and networkless situations its a real blessing. You don't need to officially support it, but it's a real time/life saver...
*** Bug 60929 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I suggest to remove this feature for 9.2.
Please don't. We could remove it from the graphical syslinux so that only "experts" can use it and they will have to deal with the known shortcomings themselves. This is -although not perfect- a really useful feature.
So I would suggest adding another experts-only boot parameter rather than offering that visible to everybody in a menu. We could live with that, but we really don't want another bunch of bug reports from people complaining that it is only half-supported.
that parameter already exists: install=hd://....., just don't expose it via syslinux.
Ok, let's follow suggestion #23. Steffen, please take the necessary action and then assign again to the yast team.
You mean comment 24?
harddisk install option is gone in boot loader
Again YaST Team -> sh
According to comment #27, this is fixed.