CentOS installation fails

jbruyet · 06-01-2014, 08:37 PM

Hey all, I've had problems installing CentOS in the past so I pretty much gave up on it. I've heard some good things about it lately so I thought I'd give it another shot but I'm having the same problem now that I've always had -- I can't get it to install. I've tried three different ISOs: 6.5 full, 6.5 netinstall and 6.2 netinstall. I've tried different installation media: DVD-R, CD-R and USB drive. I've tried three different computers: a VM on ESXi 5.1, an HP laptop and a desktop with an Asus board that currently has Debian 6 on it. When I install from CD or DVD I get past the two "Preferred Language" questions and then the install fails because it can't see my disk. When I use the USB drive the process fails after it formats the hard disk with a "Can't find installation image" error (I checked and the image is there). Every other distribution I've tried works great: Debian, Kali, OpenSUSE,etc.

Googling this problem gives me answers but none of them useful thus far. Are there any pre-installation steps that I'm not aware of when trying to install CentOS?

Thanks,

Joe B

chrism01 · 06-02-2014, 07:30 AM

Certainly sounds odd; I've installed it many times, no worries.
As far as DVD installs go, I do the following

1. check for 32 vs 64 bit before I download the iso
2. burn AS ISO at slow speed
3. checksum the DVD before use (actually the installer offers that option early on)

John VV · 06-02-2014, 02:20 PM

Never had a problem with CentOS install DVD

Now the "net install" might if the tiny installer can not set the network up

CentOS/SL/RHEL is basically my "go to" back up
i KNOW!!!! it will ALWAYS work

How is the drive partitioned ?
what format ?
CentOS6 needs a ext3 /boot ( one of the 4 primaries)
and a ext3 or 4 for the rest

the boot partition needs to be a primary

rknichols · 06-02-2014, 05:25 PM

When you say, "it can't see my disk," do you mean it can't see your hard disk or do you mean that it can't see your installation disk?

Is your "USB drive" a hard disk with a USB interface, or are you referring to a USB flash drive? I presume you mean a USB flash drive. When you say, "I checked and the image is there," do you mean you see a file named "xxxxx.iso"? If so, you copied the file to the drive wrong. You should be seeing a lot of individual files, "CentOS_BuildTag", "RELEASE-NOTES-en-US.html", "RPM-GPG-KEY...", etc. When you copy the image to the drive, you do not mount the USB flash drive. Just run "dd if=xxxxx.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=32k", where "sdX" is the whole, unpartitioned drive. (The "bs=32k" is not a critical value -- it's just the block size that I like to use.)

Apologies if this is all very obvious to you and is what you have been doing all along, but it's really hard to tell from your description.

Ztcoracat · 06-02-2014, 09:05 PM

Quote:

the install fails because it can't see my disk.

How does the installation fail?
Does it just hang?
Are you getting any errors?

The installers partition manger should see your HDD. (should)

chrism01 · 06-03-2014, 05:27 AM

Hmmm, on my Centos 6.5

Code:

 blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="ec95cdc7-c574-43ae-b51a-faf866d1faab" TYPE="ext4" 

 df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        44G   20G   23G  47% /

and I don't have a separate /boot partition.

I do notice that on my Centos 5.10, it ('/') is indeed ext3 (no separate /boot).

jbruyet · 06-03-2014, 09:49 PM

Ok, I'll try to do this one at a time...
John VV, I never get to the point to do any formatting. Once I answer the two "Language" questions I get a window that says the install can't see my "disk." In that window my options for install media are CD/DVD, hard disk, NFS and URL. Even though the install gets to that part by CD/DVD (my preferred way) it stops seeing the drive for some reason.

rknichols, I've used dd to write to the flash drive and I've used SUSE Studio Imagewriter to write to the drive. When I "checked the drive" I put it back in my primary workstation, navigated to the drive saw install.img under the Images folder. No apologies needed -- my frustration level was a little higher than normal when I did my post. :^)

Ztcoracat, perhaps halt is a better word to use. As I mentioned two paragraphs up the install gets to a window where I have the four installation media options but none of them work. With the flash drive in I can select it from the hard disk options but I get a message stating that there's no installation image.

chrism01, if only I could get that far.

Thanks,

Joe B

jbruyet · 06-03-2014, 09:56 PM

<huge, very huge, exasperated sigh> I just went in back and the stupid install is working this time. I was on about the fourth DVD that I burned; maybe I have a bad DVD burner. But then again, the flash drive never worked either. Anyway, I'm on my way to building a Nagios server. Thank you all for your help.

Thanks,

Joe B

chrism01 · 06-04-2014, 06:27 AM

BTDT (been there, done that); it was a bad DVD drive... would seem to work, then do an install until part way through, then fail...
DVD drives are cheap; consider getting a new one.

Ztcoracat · 06-04-2014, 11:42 AM

When my CentoOs installation continued to freeze and it wouldn't install I realized the HDD was on it's way out. Had bad sectors and kept making a screeching noise-
After I replace the drive the install worked.

The CD/DVD blueray drives work well from what a friend told me.

http://www.microcenter.com/search/se...x?N=4294966942
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...=-1&isNodeId=1