Debian hangs on formatting, stuck @ 33%
 

Does anyone have any experience or familiarity with installs hanging indefinitely. This 9isa fresh install attempt on to a perfectly running machine with an 8TB RAID 5 array. Note: other OS installs attempts seem to go well with it.

Currently, the indication has been stuck at the 33% for hours. This is definitely not going well I dont think.

Have you tried to format using a live cd and when installing just tell the installer to use the partition(s) the way it is?

Regards

I have not tried that so I can't comment. However, this was Debian I was attempting for installing first. I changed strategies. Now, I went with RHEL for the first install and since this supported version did seem to have all drivers compatible it went well. I will attempt the Debian after things are working with Redhat; which, my hands are full with right now to be honest.

Thanks for the reply,
I will try this when possible and if it happens again.

The Debian installer will stop at 33% when formatting, this is normal, it doesn't show any progress while formatting the drives and formatting partitions of that size may take quite some time. How long have you waited?

You are correct, and I found that out the long way. The scenario was concerning because that with all the set up giving little troubles here and there to deal with and fix it was very likely to have a hang or a configuration issue go wrong. This made this a little annoying that there was no indication that setup was moving along normally.
That first time something did go wrong as the bootloader did not load at all all after waiting very long.
When it was successful, I do not remember as I was doing other things while installing, but I think it must have been about 45 minutes???

I've got the same problem. Array size 3.8 TB - formatting hasn't finished after 9h. I don't have aproblem waiting, but this seems definitely too long? Does anyone have an idea, how long it may take before one can be sure the system hit the wall?

Thank you!

Press Alt+F4 to change to the console with the status messages and look if you got an error.

With
2x 2.5Ghz Xeon e5620 processors,
16GB 10600 ECC RAM, and
intel RAID card in a PCIe 16x slot, (5x 2TB sata)
for architecture;

It took about 45 minutes to an hour for the 33% progress bar to update.

some "older" system hybride...
 

So, for 2x2.4GHz Athlon MP, 3GB RAM ECC, 2420SA in 66MHz PCIX with 3x2TB several hours seem still reasonable.

@ TobiSGD: Thanx a lot for the tip, I just start learning about Linux.
That's what it tells (message dates back appr. 7.5h now after restart this morning after 9h over night without result):
<Timestamp> partman: mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)

Looks like still working, right?

Btw, this system has led to Linux. No 32bit OS with GPT in the MS world. And I do want have THIS system running. I know, that's not rational... (Would be more rational to upgrade to 64bit and use Windows, which I know quite well. But - how boring.)

Make sure you don't enable bad block checking as that can delay things for a very long time.

It is not enabled as long as this is not a standard setting for the debian installer.

Alt F4 and how back?
 

Good morning (at least for me),

finally formatting came to an end... (sometime this night, total time somewhere inbetween 18 and 24h).

Now I've got some follow up problem. After Alt-F4 (see above this topic above) the installation switched to command line mode. I'd like to go back to the "semi-graphics" mode it ran before. Could somebody please tell me how to?

Thanks a lot!

Have you tried Alt+ the other F keys?

To get back to the installer press Alt+F1, if you want to start a console press Alt+F2 or Alt+F3.

Great, thanx a lot. Looks good.

Ctrl+ALT+4 is the correct keys for my systems
 

Ctrl+ALT+ F4 is the correct keys for my systems

In my system DELL Worstation Precision T7500 the key combination to change terminals (graphicals and text one) are CTRL + ALT + F5/F4.

I am creating partitions for linux in a 500GB HD.
Yesterday I left the computer the whole night and it continues in the same 33% percentage. I reboot and retried again (and read this information about).
Now the system has about 30min in this status with the text console giving a last line as:
"Jan 18 14:49:36 partman: Found a dos partition table in /dev/sdb1"

As a note I have a Windows HD as sda with an empty partition and a second HD 500GB, with about 6 linux partitions (/, /home, etc, almost ext4, swap and just one FAT32 called babel for interchanges between OSs...