So what did not work out? Was it un-mounting that did not work out or was it the installation that is still misbehaving. If its the installation that is still not working out despite having unmounted the partitions, I have really run out of options as of now and I need to investigate this much deeper preferably with a similar setup of external hard disk with partitions. This might take a while though. If you would like then I can post manual instructions that you can simply copy and paste in the console that should get the job done (which is actually done by the installer in the background)

Just try unmounting one last time but this time reboot the system into the live media, do the unmounting using the commands that I shared in the last post and then try installing. The rebooting actually unmounts everything and things should work. In case it doesnt you can try the manual commands which I can share if you want

Here are the steps that you can follow to install manually:

sudo su
cd

mkdir -pv {/mnt/src,/mnt/dest}
umount /mnt/src
umount /mnt/dest
mount -o ro,loop /mnt/.boot/medium/aryalinux/root.sfs /mnt/src/

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb6
mkswap /dev/sda5

mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/dest
swapon /dev/sda5

cp -prvf /mnt/src/* /mnt/dest/

mount -v --bind /dev /mnt/dest/dev

mount -vt devpts devpts /mnt/dest/dev/pts -o gid=5,mode=620
mount -vt proc proc /mnt/dest/proc
mount -vt sysfs sysfs /mnt/dest/sys
mount -vt tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/dest/run

if [ -h /mnt/dest/dev/shm ]; then
mkdir -pv /mnt/dest/$(readlink /mnt/dest/dev/shm)
fi

chroot "/mnt/dest" /usr/bin/env -i \
HOME=/root TERM="$TERM" PS1='\u:\w\$ ' \
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin \
/bin/bash --login


This would put you into the chroot environment. Now execute the following inside the chroot environment:

INITRD=`ls /boot/initrd*`
/usr/bin/dracut -f $INITRD `ls /lib/modules/`

cat > /etc/fstab <<EOF
# Begin /etc/fstab

# file system mount-point type options dump fsck
# order

/dev/sda6 / ext4 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda5 swap swap pri=1 0 0

# End /etc/fstab
EOF

systemd-machine-id-setup
echo "joel_linux" > /etc/hostname
userdel -r aryalinux

useradd -m -k /etc/skel -c "Joel" joel
passwd joel
usermod -a -G audio joel
usermod -a -G video joel
usermod -a -G wheel joel
usermod -a -G lpadmin joel

passwd

grub-install /dev/sdb
/sbin/grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

LOCALE="en_US.utf8"

echo "LANG=$LOCALE" > /etc/locale.conf
echo "LANGUAGE=$LOCALE" >> /etc/locale.conf
echo "LC_ALL=$LOCALE" >> /etc/locale.conf

TIMEZONE="America/New_York"
ln -sfv "/usr/share/zoneinfo/$TIMEZONE" /etc/localtime

sed -i "s@autologin-user=@#autologin-user=@g" /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
sed -i "s@autologin-user-timeout=0@#autologin-user-timeout=0@g" /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
sed -i "s@pam-service=lightdm-autologin@#pam-service=lightdm-autologin@g" /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

cat > /etc/vconsole.conf <<EOF
KEYMAP="us"
EOF

# This would exit the chroot
exit

#This would exit the root prompt
exit

#This would close the console
exit

Reboot and check

Yes, the unmount was successful, the install wasn't.

Now if I need to do terminal commands listed above for install, it is not practical for a beginner that don't want to mess with such a thing. I will wait until a version of the liveCD works well with external HDD. I see some potential for that distro so I keep a eye on it.

Thank you for all your help and your patience, I guess it is by finding these issues that distros become robust.

Yes. Rightly said. I would see to it that the problem if any with the installer running on external hard disk is fixed. Thanks for pointing this out.

Can you confirm that the information below is correct. This would help me in the process of finding the issue:

1) Live Media - CD/DVD
2) ISO - AryaLinux Mate 2016.08
3) Destination partition - External HDD(ROOT : /dev/sdb6, SWAP: /dev/sdb5)

Is there any information that I missed?
Thanks for your help.

Also one last thing, After the last screen where you choose timezone in the installer, do you see any messages being printed by the installer at all in the text area inside the installer or all that it shows in the end is the Message popup that says Installation Successful?

It says which partitions are affected...nothing else. The finish message pops-up right after.

Okay. I'll take a look at it.

Hi joellapointe1717,

This issue has been fixed in the github repository. Would be uploading a new ISO with the updated installer in a few days. In the current ISO this is how the installer can be updated and it would install fine on external devices:

Boot into the live media.
Connect to the internet.
Open Terminal and enter:

cd /opt/installer
sudo git pull

Close the terminal

Now run the installer as usual.

I retried installation process with new XFCE release 2016.08 (october 7 2016). It is the same problem. I also did the git pull thing.
There is no change.

I don't know if the installation bug was supposed to be corrected in this release.

THX

This issue was fixed in the current release. As a matter few other users have raised the same issue and they reported back that its working currently. I could look into the matter further because maybe there is some use case which went un-noticed. FYI we tested the new installer on the following environments: 32/64 bit Arya and tried installing it on a 1TB external USB hard disk MBR partitioned, 32/64 bit Arya and tried installing it on an external 32 GB USB pen drive MBR partitioned. Installation was successful on all occassions. I wonder if the hard disk where you are trying to install Arya, does it have LVM/GPT? That is one area that we do not advice installing Arya on because of the LFS limitation we have(Arya is based on LFS and LFS does not support LVM). Bringing in support for LVM yes is important but I doubt that would happen anywhere in the near future.

In case its neither GPT nor LVM, please post the output of the following command (run in terminal) just after the installation failure happens:

sudo mount

finally...

I redone a partition with gparted and it worked. I'm happy! It works.

Thank you for your help and for fixing the installation process. Now I'm in the process of learning how to build with
ALPS. Is there a list of build script available somewhere?

Thanks

Hi,

Glad that it worked :-)

The build scripts are located in /var/cache/alps/scripts. You can do an ls to get the list. We keep updating the online repo so at any point in time you can do:

sudo alps updatescripts

and get the latest set of scripts.