Okay, we have all had problems with installation at one time or another. But for most people there is one install that sticks out. It was the installation from hell. Maybe it was caused by hardware failures or space restrictions. Maybe the install was buggy and crashed on you (ever kill -9'd init during an install the result isn't pretty).

Personally, I know what mine was. I'll respond below. But come on everyone, get it off your chest. What was the install that just wouldn't work? Did you ever figure out what was going on? And, best of all, did you finally get the install complete?

Note: I am going to respond but my story is long and I am at work so it might take a few. Feel free to post yours without waiting for me to lead off.

My hardest install was gentoo, not a normal install of gentoo, it was an "~x86" linux-headers-2.6.5 NPTL on a software raid and agressive cflags on an overclocked computer with irq addressing problems. It died on emerge system telling me any package I tried to install was masked and emerge sync began refusing to work. Im going to try again probably tomorrow night removing the overclocking part and trying to manually set irqs just to eliminate potential extra problems, and before you start talking about gentoo users taking extra time to set up super-fast systems that are too unstable to be worth maintaining its just a pet project to see what I can do, not to have as a serious system.

I am a fan of the BSD flavors -- as some of you might have noticed. And a while back I heard about MircoBSD. I had a spare box and decided I would give it a try.

I installed MicroBSD (without major issue) and noticed it was a lot like OpenBSD. I decided to do a side by side install (OBSD on one partition and MBSD on the other) so I could compare how they stacked up. I would also be able to mount the other systems drives to poke around there.

OpenBSD has this quirk. Maybe I should say had since I don't know if this was ever changed but I doubt it was. OpenBSD has no problem being installed next to other operating systems but it won't play with itself. What I mean by that is, OpenBSD will not deal with having two different versions of itself on the same drive.

When OpenBSD boots, it reads the start of the slice (Partition to the rest of the world) it is located on. It loads the bootloader which then finds the FIRST OpenBSD slice on the disk, loads the first partition, and then proceeds to boot. Normally, this is not a problem. You should only have one OpenBSD slice on a drive and even if you had more than one the second one is going to be data anyway and not bootable.

So, if you manage to get a second version of OpenBSD installed on the same disk (not a picnic in the first place), the bootloader will blissfully load the version on the first slice no matter where it was loaded from. Under normal conditions this is not a problem. First off, OpenBSD expects to act as a server and not be dual booted. And even if it is dual booted, there is no reason to have a second (different) version of it on the same computer.

The real problem came because MicroBSD was a lot closer to OpenBSD than just the surface. Not only did it have the same exact booting issues... but it also used the same partition id number (a6). So, I would select to boot MicroBSD and OpenBSD would load up. And if I selected OpenBSD... OpenBSD would load up. There was no way to boot MicroBSD. I was having issues changing the partition ids with fdisk and then rebooting... besides, that was hardly elegent because I needed to choose which OS I wanted to boot before I shut the computer down.

This started the long, and complicated, proceedure of making MicroBSD recognize a5 as it's partition. This was complicated by the fact that changing the partition id number would scew up the bootblocks and installing the boot blocks would panic the system if they tried to install to a non MicroBSD filesystem. Basically, I needed to be on an a5 numbered partition to use the tools to boot the a5 numbered partition. It was a chicken and the egg problem.

In the end, I needed to make two whole different sets of tool chains, new boot media with the whole new set, and change everything while remembering which version of disklabel was the correct one for the task at hand.

It was a huge mess. But, eventually, I got the system up. And both operating systems would boot correctly. And after a little more tweaking, they would load each other's file-systems. It was a lot of work, it made the box completely non-standard (read: no binary system updates for me), and all that work was for nothing. It was for nothing because I never tried to submit the patches to the project -- not sure they would have even wanted them -- and I blew the system off three weeks later when I was done playing with it.

But that was the worst install I have ever done. I have no idea how many HOURS of work and modifications I put into that system. Although it did make me have pretty intimate knowledge of how both systems booted and recognized their disks.

My hardest install was WindowsXP. Put in the disc, format hard drive, install, done. Now try to go online, immediately get bombarded by 50 viral attacks before I could even install Norton Anti-virus or apply any Windows Security patches. When I actually did try to install patches from windows update, they would download but when they started installing a virus would kill the process and it would never get on my system. Try to maintain stability on your system when a virus kills the svchost process every 5 minutes causing a forced shutdown of Windows. Within two days, things were so corrupted that Windows was missing vital .dll files and would refuse to boot. Furthermore, upon doing the "Windows Repair Utility", it threw me to a DOS prompt with an extremely limited amount of commands and not a single hint at how to repair the system.


After putting up with that installation hell about 10 times in a row within a week and a half, I tried Mandrake Linux, which popped in, installed itself, and ran perfectly. Moral of the story: Windows sucks.

First it was win98, could not get shovel2 to load and it kept locking up.
and Peanut linux would not install but that was because my bios would not boot from the cd.

Ugh, I have blocked out all the memories of trying to install windows on disks. It helps that I haven't used windows in years (at least on my machine... I have used it on other people's).

Not only was it just as prone (if not moreso) to errors during install as any other operating system... more than once it refused to continue at the registration number (or whatever they call it) screen. Even when I was holding the fully authorized book -- with security features to prove it was from MS -- and typing the number right off the cover... even though that book was just taken out of the brand new box with the disks in the drive. Actually, that happened with almost every LEGAL copy of windows I ever used. I never had a problem with the ones I "borrowed". Apparently the CD liked the "cracked" number better.

mandrake 10, lol.

suse 9,.1 pro and MEPIS were a breeze

Once I had to revive a used laptop that came with a faulty unbootable CD drive, no floppy disk drive, and with a locked out BIOS. Took a whole day to complete the procedure.

win95 on machines with bad memory, or win95 on packard bell 486's, getting the sound cards to work. torture.
for linux, installing one of the early gnome beta versions on an old slackware in about '97. seemed like hundreds of dependencies. had to try various versions of dozens of packages before i got gnome up. on several packages i just had to make -i install and hope it got enough done to be of use. maybe 6 full days of compiling and downloading packages. maybe more.

I have 2,
first was Gentoo on my laptop, I was very fresh to laptops and Linux, it was torture I screwed my entire disk and I have no idea how,,, I was almost put off Linux cos of that.
(Note to Gentoo fans, it was my own fault not the distro's)

The second was a server upgrade in work, we had an old HP (POS) P2 netserver that was running SBS 45 and sage it was running slow cos it was old and fighting the demands of modern software and high traffic.
So I bought a new Dell server and tried to put SBS 4.5 on it,,,, no chance!
Dell servers can only use win 2k or above, there is a workaround but the boss wasnt interested so I bought SBS2k, it installed fine
and I now have SBS 4.5 running nicely as a server in my loft at home for MP3's

Redhat 7.3 on an NEC laptop. More crashes than a demolition derby. Everything was an absolute pain to configure, modem /hd /fd had minds of their own it seemed. Almost gave up on Linux because of it.

He he,this is a really fun thread.It's great knowledge and experience in the end,but it´s times like that,when you're stuck with some supertechnical setup for hours and hours,you start to question your sanity... At least I do.
The most difficult installation I've done is actually the DOS-based X-wing CD-ROM game on an old Win95 box.I had to learn how to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys to get them to load drivers for the sound card and cd-rom drive,and to free up memory in the first 640kb.It took forever to get it right.Exhausting torture.But still fun.

debian

I could never actually get Debian working but I did get Slackware working.

Slackware 9 was not the trickiest install but it took me about 2 days to get my X working correctly with x86config. At that time I was unfamiliar with configuring X. Now I can configure it by hand somewhat. Thank you Slackware 9 with fancy-shmancy hardware.

Gentoo. Spent an entire weekend dealing with it. Results = lots of dents the wall from pounding my head against it. Never got it to work. -- J.W.