Bug Report: Installer (RC2)

metalforever · 06-30-2016, 12:03 PM

I have 7 hard drives, two of which are RAID1, formatted NTFS. 5 of these drives are spinning disk, and 2 of them are SSD. I had set up one of the SSD disks (/dev/sde) for install by creating a swap partition and a main linux partition using cfdisk. I ran the setup and the setup did not detect the swap partition. I bypassed that and noticed that the setup did not detect my /dev/sde drive for install, nor any of my other drives, except something marked mk(...) instead of /dev/sdX . So, I cannot install the release candidate for 14.2 on my machine.

Didier Spaier · 06-30-2016, 03:41 PM

That is strange. To investigate, please start the installer but do not type "setup" once logged in.

Instead, type probe. This should output a file /var/log/setup/tmp/SeTfdisk.

You can mount an USB stick's partition on /floppy to copy this file on it. Then please post the content here inside a [CODE] block or attach it to your next post (with the extension .txt so that upload be accepted).

PS Not sure that I understand your setup, but be aware that a NTFS partition won't be recognized by the installer as a Linux partition.

PS2 probe ends with cat the file SeTfdisk (as it is supposed to be piped) so it will be displayed on the console. Just clear the screen before copying the file.

metalforever · 07-01-2016, 02:02 PM

Hello,

In the case where I found the bug, I was attempting to made /dev/sde the Slackware installation. I have attached the text file with the output when I ran the command. I have also attached the output of fdisk -l as hard-drives.txt (you should see different output here). I only had /dev/m(?) as an option in the installer for both install and the swap partition.

Didier Spaier · 07-01-2016, 03:52 PM

Thanks for testing, that gives useful information to investigate.

I think that I understand partly what happens.

In hard-drives.txt i see:

Code:

Disk /dev/md126: 1.4 TiB, 1499748892672 bytes, 2929197056 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 131072 bytes / 131072 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x536333c7

Device       Boot Start        End    Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/md126p1       2048 2783752191 2783750144  1.3T  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT


Disk /dev/md124: 3.5 TiB, 3800747212800 bytes, 7423334400 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 8DCEEF06-0548-446C-A1E7-512E2469197B

Device        Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/md124p1     34     262177     262144  128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/md124p2 264192 7423332351 7423068160  3.5T Microsoft basic data

I never used Raid, but I assume that's your RAID1 hard drives, right?

But... In the installer, /sbin/probe "believes" these are "an old format and no RAID":

Code:

 else # old format and no RAID:
  if cat /proc/partitions | grep md 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null ; then
    cat /proc/partitions | grep md | while read line ; do
      SMASHED_LINE=$line
      MAJOR=`echo $SMASHED_LINE | cut -f 1 -d ' '`
      if [ "$MAJOR" = "9" ]; then
        list_md `echo $SMASHED_LINE | cut -f 3 -d ' ' | tr -d '/'` \
                `echo $SMASHED_LINE | cut -f 4 -d ' '`
      fi
    done
  fi
  fdisk -l 2> /dev/null >> $TMP/SeTfdisk
fi

So it calls the function list_md:

Code:

list_md() {
  if ( is_swap "/dev/$2" ); then TYPE="Linux swap"; else TYPE="Linux"; fi
  echo "/dev/$2  1 2 $1 kk $TYPE" >> $TMP/SeTfdisk
}

... Thus tagging them wrongly as Linux partitions.

So when setup does this:

Code:

 probe -l 2> /dev/null | grep -E 'Linux$' | sort 1> $TMP/SeTplist 2> /dev/null

... As the output of "probe -l" is SeTfdisk.txt, this leads to a partitions list (expected to contain all Linux native partitions and only these):

Code:

/dev/md124  1 2 3711667200 kk Linux
/dev/md126  1 2 1464598528 kk Linux
/dev/sde1  *         2048 484494235 484492188  231G 83 Linux

Of course the RAID partitions should not be there.

Unfortunately I can't easily investigate further because this list is processed in the script /usr/lib/setup/SeTpartitions by the function gen_part_list that in turn computes the size of each partition listed this way:

Code:

SIZE=`get_part_size $DEVICE`

And the function get_part_size is:

Code:

# get_part_size( dev ) - Return the size in K, M, G, T, or P of the named partition.
get_part_size() {
  numfmt --to=iec $(blockdev --getsize64 $1)
}

But this spits errors here as I do not have the devices listed in SeTplist (I can't fake as I have no RAID device)...

I would be curious though to know if /sbin/blockdev[1] considers /dev/md* as block devices or at least what would be the output of get_part_size. if it is not a number as expected, maybe that makes gen_part_list give the wrong output you observed?

@Patrick: as a quirky workaround, maybe you could just exclude /dev/md* partitions from SeTplist?

Oh, and isn't the "-l" in "probe -l" a remain of a previous version? I ask because I don't see an argument/option processed in /sbin/probe but in the functions. Maybe I just need to clean my glasses...

[1]In the installer /sbin/blockdev is a BusyBox binary. May I assume that it doesn't differ much from the one in the installed system?

metalforever · 07-01-2016, 05:23 PM

Quote:

I never used Raid, but I assume that's your RAID1 hard drives, right?

Whats interesting is that there are actually 2 3.5TB disks at /dev/md124, not one. These are both in RAID1. The disk at /dev/md126 is just 1 disk that used to be in a RAID 1 environment. The other drive died, so I retired this one (reformatted it) , and just use it for normal stuff that doesn't a backup. What I'm saying is that there is no RAID at /dev/md126 any more.

metalforever · 07-03-2016, 02:47 PM

This particular issue appears to be fixed in 14.2. The LILO bootloader, however, hangs. I was able to install Slackware 14.2 by installing GRUB manually.