Arch Linux

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,017

[SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

I am getting the following error when trying to install Arch64 on my desktop using the 2009.02 iso...

Error partitioning /dev/sda (see /dev/tty7 for details)

And when I switch to /dev/tty7, I see...

/arch/setup: line 496: /sbin/sfdisk: Input/output error

The same disk works fine on my laptop. Does anyone have any ideas?

Last edited by tony5429 (2009-06-10 18:23:44)

FrozenFox

Member

From: College Station, TX

Registered: 2008-03-23

Posts: 422

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Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

Sounds to me like your partition table on the disk is screwed up. I remember having something like that happen to me on parted when I re-ordered my device nodes, then in trying to fix that, sfdisk reported something similar and it all went to hell. Oddly, I could still use the disk as-is otherwise; as it seems to be in your case.

Does gparted open the disk and display partitions okay on the laptop? Your saying "works fine" is not specific enough to answer that question; as it may work (like mine did) but still have a table screwed up enough to not be able to open in a partition program for maintenance.

If that's not the case, I'm not sure.

Last edited by FrozenFox (2009-05-14 03:37:53)

darthaxul

Member

Registered: 2008-09-24

Posts: 156

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

I've burned iso images before and sometimes the older cdrom drives are not sesitive enough to read the bits off the disk. Or like the other person said ur hard drive might be failing.

thisperishedmin

Member

Registered: 2008-11-04

Posts: 164

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

If your cdrom is older or finicky, it may be worth trying a reburn...

However I agree that its more likely your partition tables are messed up. I had a previous experience with a hard drive.  I was unable to partition the drive through Arch or Gparted...yet the Vista disk continued booting fine.  No tools in Windows for looking at the partition scheme would even work.

If I remember correctly, I went to the hard drive manufactures site for their diagnostics tool (in my case Western Digital) and wrote 0's to the drive.  After that things were fine again... of course, you'd lose any other data on the drive, and your mileage may vary if this is even a solution...

Hope this helps and good luck!

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

These days I only want to poke gparted with a long stick, it makes a mess of partition tables if you perform anything else than a format with it.

To wipe your mbr (which includes the partition table) you can do:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1

This will not wipe the data you have on your disk _but it will_ make it unaccessible, and it will be much faster than writing the whole disk with zeros.

I would stick with cfdisk to create the partitions and use gparted only to format then or as an alternative use mkfs.something.

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R00KIE
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tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,017

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

Thanks so much for all your tips/suggestions!

First off, I tried reburning the iso. Unfortunately, the new disk is also not working.

Then I tried ROOKIE's suggestion of wiping the mbr. I am also doing the setup manually now so that I can see exactly where it fails. Using cfdisk to partition the drive was fine. I created the following partitions,

sda1: 256MiB Primary Linux swap (swap)
sda2: 32 MiB Primary Linux (/boot)
sda3: 999 GiB Primary Linux (/)

Then, setting the mountpoints is where it failed. I got the error "Error creating filesystem ext4 on /dev/sda3." Switching to vc7, I see...

Setting up swapsace version 1, size = 248972 KiB
no label, UUID=78fd3baf-b533-414f-bea0-374047e3f801
mke2fs: error while loading shared libraries: /lib/libext2fs.so.2: cannot read file data: Input/output error

Does anyone have any ideas? I also find it odd that it is looking for libext2fs.so.2 to create an ext4 filesystem...

Mr.Elendig

#archlinux@freenode channel op

From: The intertubes

Registered: 2004-11-07

Posts: 4,092

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

Check the cd with md5sum

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tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,017

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

I'm getting the correct md5 (91228e6b71d74e7a52269f1aaf225a6d) for both the old and new 2009.02 disks. Also, as I mentioned in the first post, the cds work fine in my laptop. So the issue must be with either my desktop hdd, or my desktop optical drive... I am going to try installing arch on a different hdd on my desktop and see what happens.

fphillips

Member

From: Austin, TX

Registered: 2009-01-24

Posts: 202

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

Your hard drive is fine - it's most definitely the optical drive. This phenomenon has been documented pretty heavily over on the Ubuntu forums. Sometimes some drives are flaky about reading disks burned by other drives. The burn isn't bad per se, it's just the combination of factors combine to cause errors. I think I may have even had this problem in the past, years ago, although it's a bit foggy now.

ADD: So you need to install with a different optical drive.

Last edited by fphillips (2009-05-15 04:32:33)

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,017

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

Well I'm glad to hear that as I discovered I do not have a spare hard drive to try out. Actually, I'd ultimately like to install off a USB drive. A couple days ago, I backed up my flash drive and used "dd if=archlinux-2009.02-ftp-x86_64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M" to write the image to the flash drive. I tried the flash drive in my laptop and it worked perfectly. But when I tried the flash drive in my desktop, it would freeze up when I tried to boot off it. Any ideas? If I have to, I'll just buy a new optical drive and go that route... To be honest, I've had issues with this optical drive in the past.

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,017

Re: [SOLVED] Cannot Install Arch64 with 2009.02 ISO

Well I just went ahead and upgraded my optical drive and sure enough it works fine now.