archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

jfabernathy · 2022-01-03 13:24:52

I'm no expert but this is confusing to me. I have a system that I successfully installed arch on with the archinstall script. I went through the "choose" process for partitioning the disk to have a FAT32 /boot 512M partition and a 930GB ext4 partition on /.

If I turn around and do it again, but this time I choose to assign mount points to 512M partition as /boot and the 930GB partition to /, shows the /boot as a vfat partition. If I turn on the format flags but leave the file systems untouched the install fails. I have to change the /boot to FAT32 to make the script work.

archinstall is the one that changed the /boot to vfat to start with??

seth · 2022-01-03 13:38:06

It's not clear to me what you've done or what the problem is (in part because I've never used that installer script…) but vfat is effectively fat32 (it also covers fat16 and fat12, but those are borderline useless) - "changing" vfat to fat32 isn't a thing.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=VFAT

Maybe post the exact error messages and partition/filesystem status ("lsblk -f" might suffice for the beginning) you're facing, also see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855

progandy · 2022-01-03 14:01:34

I'd guess archinstall has a bug here. It uses "fat32" internally as the filesystem identifier, for formatting it then correctly calls mkfs.vfat. The autodetect of existing partitions probably returns "vfat" which is not converted to the internal representation.

Last edited by progandy (2022-01-03 14:10:40)

jfabernathy · 2022-01-03 14:18:51

I know that vfat and fat32 are interchangeable because I can manually install Arch doing either mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 or mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1.

archinstall does not recognize vfat as a valid file system if you choose option 8 to select the file system for the partition. In that case you have to use fat32. Once you do that, and install your system, all is good.

The next time you boot the USB key and run archinstall it shows that same partition as vfat and if you leave it alone, the install will fail.

To me it's a bug and I cannot post logs because it's during the install process when you have nothing to capture the console with easily except a camera.

I like archinstall because to quickly build test systems it's convenient. However, the recent changes to handling the file systems has made it harder to use.

I'd just like to to have the option to manually setup my partitions with fdisk or leave them as they are already setup. Then just have the install script ask which partition is for what purpose and take it from there. i.e which is /boot, which is root ("/"), which is /home, etc.
It used to sort of work that way, but in November it got changed for the worse.

seth · 2022-01-03 14:35:58

From that description I'm convinced that progandy hit the nail and this is simply an bogus string comparism in the script => file a bug.
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues

jfabernathy · 2022-01-03 14:46:51

seth wrote:

From that description I'm convinced that progandy hit the nail and this is simply an bogus string comparism in the script => file a bug.
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues

I submitted an issue.

Torxed · 2022-01-03 18:22:48

Thank you for submitting that issue @jfabernathy!

And @seth is right, this is a bug that you managed to hit.
We condensed down archinstall to use one nomenclature for that specific filesystem but must have missed one comparison along the way.

I'll have that fixed until v2.3.1 (Due this weekend). Apologies for this one!

Arch Linux

#1 2022-01-03 13:24:52

archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

#2 2022-01-03 13:38:06

Re: archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

#3 2022-01-03 14:01:34

Re: archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

#4 2022-01-03 14:18:51

Re: archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

#5 2022-01-03 14:35:58

Re: archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

#6 2022-01-03 14:46:51

Re: archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

#7 2022-01-03 18:22:48

Re: archinstall formats as vfat but then doesn't understand it?

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