Arch Linux

cmsigler

Member

Registered: 2013-11-18

Posts: 35

[SOLVED] genfstab is not run during archinstall?

Hello all,

I hope this is not noise, nor a misunderstanding or mis-operation on my part.

I just provisioned a VPS.  This provider helpfully allows Arch installs, and connects the latest ISO to your machine so you can install-it-yourself.

So, I decided to try archinstall for the first time.  With one small exception it worked quite well.

(The feature of not installing a user account was something I noticed because I opted to arch-chroot into the installed system.  I ran through the manual steps to make sure nothing had been missed.  That's when I installed a user account for myself.)

The one exception is that /etc/fstab was the blank default as installed by the filesystem pkg.  I installed arch-install-scripts while in the chroot then ran genfstab -U.

After that, I rebooted to the hard disk and the VPS came up fine.  I'm guessing I would have had to reattach the ISO image for disaster recovery to fix fstab if I hadn't caught this problem(?).

Please close this thread if I did something wrong and this isn't helpful.  Thank you for archinstall!!!  It's a time saver

Clemmitt Sigler

Last edited by cmsigler (2022-01-06 20:17:44)

Torxed

Member

Registered: 2013-01-10

Posts: 200

Re: [SOLVED] genfstab is not run during archinstall?

On your installed system, would you mind posting

/var/log/archinstall/install.log

The fstab should have been generated upon exit: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstal … er.py#L145

So either something didn't go wright, and I'd like to take a peek at your particular install.log or it's a profile error somewhere.

cmsigler

Member

Registered: 2013-11-18

Posts: 35

Re: [SOLVED] genfstab is not run during archinstall?

On your installed system, would you mind posting

/var/log/archinstall/install.log

The fstab should have been generated upon exit: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstal … er.py#L145

So either something didn't go wright, and I'd like to take a peek at your particular install.log or it's a profile error somewhere.

Thank you.  Sorry it took me a few days to get back to you.

This is a new VPS I set up on servercheap.  They very kindly connected the latest Arch ISO to my machine from which I booted.  I decided to try archinstall for the first time just to see how it would go.

I have posted install.log here:  https://pastebin.com/adBBC9wi

I accepted all the defaults as I went through the process, including disk partitioning.  I figured I could always start from scratch if I needed to.  AFAICT everything else went correctly -- I went through the wiki Installation Guide to double-check.  Installing an "empty" fstab (identical to /usr/share/factory/etc/fstab) instead of one configured by genfstab was the only exception.

HTH.

Clemmitt

Torxed

Member

Registered: 2013-01-10

Posts: 200

Re: [SOLVED] genfstab is not run during archinstall?

It's a bit strange. Assuming you were running v2.3.0 of the installer (was on the latest ISO at the time).
The fstab should have been generated correctly as does the log confirm in these two last steps of the installer:

Updating /mnt/archinstall/etc/fstab
Installation completed without any errors. You may now reboot.

The way we run genfstab is:

/usr/bin/genfstab -pU /mnt/archinstall

And then we write that result to `/mnt/archinstall/etc/fstab`.
What is your expected fstab? Which entries do you have there right now?
And if you removed any, which ones did you remove and why?

cmsigler

Member

Registered: 2013-11-18

Posts: 35

Re: [SOLVED] genfstab is not run during archinstall?

What is your expected fstab? Which entries do you have there right now?
And if you removed any, which ones did you remove and why?

Well, now I'm not sure what happened.  When I used the optional offering post-install to chroot into the system, I looked at /etc/fstab and it was the "blank" one.  I then installed arch-install-scripts and ran:

# genfstab -U / >> /etc/fstab.new

I looked at fstab.new.  It was correct, one entry for each of /, /boot and /home, so I overwrote /etc/fstab.  Then I rebooted and everything was OK.  That was a week ago and I haven't looked at fstab since.

However, looking at it just now, fstab has duplicated entries, lines for /, /boot and /home, then duplicate /, /boot and /home lines, except the second set have DOS-style CRLF line terminators.  Maybe this was just a weird memory/storage caching issue on the VPS system???

Anyway, this makes me think genfstab actually did work as expected and something went wrong elsewhere.  (At least I didn't completely muck it up....)  Please close my "bug report" and accept my thanks for your time and trouble

Clemmitt