install-x86-minimal-2004.2 doesn't work...

whitehawk · Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 3:32 pm Post subject:

Same trouble: 2004.2 Minimal Install CD won't boot. It just skips to the grub on hda. And before someone asks for it. Yeah they are supposed to boot from CD.

I have two machines
'st.
Abit BP6 (Via Apollo Pro 133a chipset)
Two HD-s on the first ide channel. RAID chip is disabled in BIOS.
It has two optical drives. An ASUS CRW-4816A (hdc) and an LG HL-DT-STDVD-ROM GDR8161B. (hdd)

The other machine is:
Abit SA6 (Intel 815 chipset)
It has an older Sony cd-rom drive. (sec master)
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Sanjiyan · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2004 Posts: 39

I have managed to boot from both of the 2004.2 CDs.

I used Smart BootManager which is explained in the Alt Install pages on the Gentoo website.

Its simple and works like a charm

whitehawk · Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 3:46 pm Post subject:

The thing is, that I could do it from an existing install. But this live cd should be for installing. So this thing is _NOT_ a real solution. "Oh yeah I have a Live CD, but it's dead!! Instead I can use something else." Great this Live CD is useless! And I would expect 2004.2 to work on both machines, when 2004.1 did. I heard that that the universal works, but I have no time to download that.
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Sanjiyan · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2004 Posts: 39

universial didnt work for for me, hence I used that Smart Boot Manager...

Bungopolis · Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 9:01 pm Post subject:

As I posted earlier, the minimal live CD does not work for me, but I just tested the universal, and it works great.

In fact, its fantastic. It boots much faster than 2004.0 did, and it detects my SATA drives (on /dev/sda), as well as my on-board network adapter -- neither of which 2004.0 could detect.

Hardware:
- Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe (NForce2)
- Lite-On LTC-48161H CD-RW/DVD drive.

whitehawk · Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 10:03 pm Post subject:

Yeah, real cool. If you have the bandwidth to download useless stuff. I mean stages and all...
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Bungopolis · Posted: Tue Aug 03, 2004 10:57 pm Post subject:

Well that's right. Luckily for me it isnt much trouble to get the universal, but its a real benefit for a lot of people with limited badwidth to have such a light platform for installing gentoo... so somebody ought to get on this issue and at least make an announcement about it.

soroh6 · Apprentice Joined: 07 Nov 2002 Posts: 232

Just thought I'd post back to say that the Universal CD did work for me. 604mb however.. lead me to a long night of waiting for it to download.

I didn't try the minimal, but the universal also booted an old 233mhz I picked up recently.. didn't take to long, but it's now running Gentoo as well (from, blech, Windows 98! Heh..) with dnsmasq serving up the dhcp and dns cache goodness (and iptables of course :b).

So, yeah. Devs?
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einheitlix · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 9:31 am Post subject:

I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe rev. 2.0 mainboard with a Phoenix AwardBIOS and the minimal LiveCD 2004.2 wouldn't boot for me either. The universal one works, though. Astonishingly, with my brother's computer the minimal LiveCD works as well (weird...).

It is a solution to download the universal LiveCD if one wants to spend a night downloading useless stuff. Still, it would be nice if that bug was fixed

@devs... any thoughts?

thepigs · n00b Joined: 04 Aug 2004 Posts: 6

I had the same problem.

I resolved it by rebuilding the .iso

Basic steps:
I copied the mounted minimal install image to a directory on the hard disk
and then followed the directions on this page:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/iso.php

i.e. I ran this command:

mkisofs -o output.iso \
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
root-of-iso-tree

The .iso image ends up being around 1MB smaller than the one from gentoo.org.

whitehawk · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 1:30 pm Post subject:

I do wonder if this is so damn simple then why hasn't it been resoved officially. I will try this.
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mianka · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 2:56 pm Post subject: booting 2004/2 cd

Had the same problem but suddenly my computer decided to cooperate and installed all.AMD64 on MSI kt8 neo.It seems a hit and miss thing

DavidMCS · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 4:16 pm Post subject:

We're having the same issue with the 2004.2 Minimal ISO too.

We've tried 4 different CD burners, SCSI & IDE under Linux and Windows with a number of different CD writing programs. FWIW we never had an issue making LiveCDs in the past with any of the aforementioned burners and or programs. We also downloaded the ISO from 3 different mirror sites. We have quite a few workstations of varied hardware configurations that we've tried to boot the LiveCD(s) with and had minimal success. i.e. 90% of the workstations would not boot.

One thing we did find though that no one else has mentioned yet is that if we use an old 12x CD-ROM drive we have in the shop as a tester it will boot any of the LiveCDs we made on any PC we try it in!

Damn, I haven't seen this many coasters around here since CD burning was a new technology. :-)

We're going to try rebuilding the ISO as described by another poster and see if that works. I'll post a follow up if we have any success.

DavidMCS · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 5:38 pm Post subject:

DavidMCS · Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 7:19 pm Post subject:

Fixing the Gentoo 2004.2 x86 minimal live CD.

Requires Loop back device support compiled into kernel see Block Devices --->

1. Download the 2004.2 x86 minimal iso file
2. Mount the iso
# mount -o loop /path/to/iso /path/to/mount
3. Copy all files from /path/to/mount to a new directory somewhere
# cp -R /path/to/mount/* /new/directory/somewhere/
4. Edit the isolinux.cfg
# cd /new/directory/somewhere/
# cd isolinux
# nano -w isolinux.cfg
* change all occurrences of loop=/livecd.squashfs to loop=/livecd.squ
* change kernel memtest86 to kernel memtest
* save and exit
* Note if your using a gui text editor make sure it does not leave behind a isolinux.cfg~ , if so deleat it.
* Changed the squashfs to squ because when rebuilt the iso changes the image to .squ
* Changed memtest86 to memtest because when rebuilt the iso leaves off the 6 on the memtest86 kernel filename for some reason
# mv memtest86 memtest
5. Change to directory where iso will be made
6. Build the iso
# mkisofs -o name-of-iso.iso \
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
/new/directory/somewhere/

7. Burn your new 2004.2 LiveCD and enjoy.

--

huicht · n00b Joined: 07 Aug 2004 Posts: 5

<AOL mode>
Me too !!!!11!!one!!
</AOL mode>

SCNR

Greetings,

i'm having the same problems (not) booting the minimal LiveCD. I've wasted already 3 cds on this (burning with nero -> finalize, not finalize, cd-r, cd-rw, et al. -> doesn't work :-(

). Right now i am downloading the Universal CD.

As it seems there is no solution around yet (other than using Universal CD or fixing the CD under *nix, which doesn't work for me because i'm only running Windows at the moment) i would like to kindly ask if anyone (devs/maintainers) could elaborate on this issue.

TIA
huicht

mianka · Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 9:16 am Post subject: cd-bootproblem

On my machines the problem goes away when you boot in "smp nonfb".Then suddenly the installation worked perfectly.

isnogood · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Jul 2003 Posts: 96

That only works if the CD boots.

shur · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Aug 2004 Posts: 95

I tried DavidMCS's solution and it works for me. Thanks David.

shur

stalcair · n00b Joined: 07 Aug 2003 Posts: 57

I hope this doesn't come across snotty, because I think the Gentoo team has done a great job in building up a highly configurable distro. Take any negative vibes as just a miscomunication on my part, please.

As I don't see this nor many of the other "known issues" ever posted, I thought I would throw this out.

Some suggestions/proposals to help move this along and help everyone out. (Devs and community)

1. Post known issues into a "Known Issues" or "errata" area for EVERY single component that you can. Groans at this might sound similar to those heard when some loon suggested posting Changelogs and a USE flag system to installing from source packages. Linking to the bugzilla entry that is currently tracking the issue would help greatly.

2. Update this as necessary and let it evolve. What may emerge :roll:

is a pattern to the problem AND solution.

3. Understand that forums, while great, are not efficient repositories of knowledge especially when relating to complex systems like an OS, its components, and all the hardware configurations. Forums are a fallback method and often searching turns into a multi hour project for each issue... that adds up when you run into the Symphony of Constant Problems on your system.

This could be a companion to the bugzilla system, the forums, and IRC. You will still have those noble souls that create guides that end up on the forums or the Gentoo Docs. While this won't magically make people search before posting, but will reduce the frustration and time-nukage that is required to find solutions.

It may be helpful to keep this formulat in mind overall:
If you are tired of frequently answering the same question, try updating a FAQ or Knowlege Base. The searcing with phpBB is known to be limited and even with the suggestions in the existing FAQ there are times that you must just luck out what you need.

This might just help reduce the frustration of the developers and the users with problems, not to mention make it easier to avoid the problems in the first place. I admit that I have slacked off on "research" of compatible problems, if only because I would like to see my baby daughter. Hours upon hours upon more hours of filtering, searching, sifting and the like is not productive if you simply want to perform task XYZ. I am beginning to feel less and less guilty about having dual booted systems when people ask if they can upload pics from their USB device or flash, listen to some music, burn a cd (or read it), etc. Things that are easily done with "that other os." My excuses with them are wearing them out I think. :cry:

Any way to make it easier to view what the problem is, what state the efforts to fix it are, or just what works for configurations similar to yours help both the Dev's to solve it and the Community to use it. As a side effect, the users then are also testers and the rule of thumb with testing is to standardize both your methods and your data storage/retrieval.

Are forums an effective way to track this?

Again, this is intended to help. I really am quite impressed with how Gentoo has evolved but vigilence should never be underestimated.

lordbelial · n00b Joined: 18 Jul 2003 Posts: 47

Can anyone maybe host a working copy of 2004.2 minimal that works?
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massacgr · n00b Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 6

The Gentoo 2004.2 Universal Live CD boots on both of my computers, but the Gentoo 2004.2 Minimal CD only boots on my newer computer. Both computers have the exact same DVD/CD-ROM model (Pioneer DVD-115 DVD-ROM. I also tried swapping the two drives between computers and again the new computer boots the minimal CD and the old one does not. Just a heads up...

IntergalacticWalrus · Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 3:44 am Post subject:

Just adding a "me too" to this already large thread. The minimal 2004.2 image is DEFINITELY BROKEN. It really, _really_ needs to be fixed.

kennetb · n00b Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 2

Considering DavidMCS' fix, could it be that some BIOSes only support ISO9660 level 1 (8.3) filenames?

FrostEyes · n00b Joined: 22 Apr 2004 Posts: 9 Location: Denmark

I can just say one thing. X86-minimal 2004.2 sucks big time. I have wasted 4 cds on it.
I have used 1.4 and its work just fine, but the new one doesnt.
I have an Epox motherboard with NForce 2 chipset.