System Rescue CD install to USB stick fails

garydale · 06-01-2018, 02:33 PM

I gave up for a while but have now returned to the problem. I'm not getting as far as I used to - it's not even bringing up the choose medium dialog. Instead I'm getting

Code:

root@transponder:/mnt# mount -o loop,exec,ro /home/garydale/Downloads/systemrescuecd-x86-5.2.2.iso /mnt/sysrescuecd
root@transponder:/mnt# cd sysrescuecd/
root@transponder:/mnt/sysrescuecd# ./usb_inst.sh           
blockdev: cannot open /dev/sde: No medium found
Device [/dev/sde] detected as [EPSON    Storage         ] is removable and size=0MB
* Device [/dev/sde] is not mounted
blockdev: cannot open /dev/sdf: No medium found
Device [/dev/sdf] detected as [EPSON    Storage         ] is removable and size=0MB
* Device [/dev/sdf] is not mounted
blockdev: cannot open /dev/sdg: No medium found
Device [/dev/sdg] detected as [EPSON    Storage         ] is removable and size=0MB
* Device [/dev/sdg] is not mounted
Device [/dev/sdh] detected as [USB      DISK 2.0        ] is removable and size=3915MB
* Device [/dev/sdh] is not mounted
blockdev: cannot open /dev/sdj: No medium found
Device [/dev/sdj] detected as [Multiple Card  Reader    ] is removable and size=0MB
* Device [/dev/sdj] is not mounted
dialog: loadlocale.c:130: _nl_intern_locale_data: Assertion `cnt < (sizeof (_nl_value_type_LC_TIME) / sizeof (_nl_value_type_LC_TIME[0]))' failed.
./usb_inst.sh: line 491:  5013 Aborted                 ${PROG_DIALOG} --infobox "$1" 20 75
dialog: loadlocale.c:130: _nl_intern_locale_data: Assertion `cnt < (sizeof (_nl_value_type_LC_TIME) / sizeof (_nl_value_type_LC_TIME[0]))' failed.
./usb_inst.sh: line 491:  5014 Aborted                 ${PROG_DIALOG} --infobox "$1" 20 75

I'm not sure what the various EPSON devices are. I do have an Epson scanner and an Epson multifunction printer attached. Perhaps it's the printer's memory card reader?

The .iso image has been sha256sum verified so it's good.It's the same image version I used earlier. I just moved it to local storage and re-verified it.

The error seems to be about the LC_TIME locale setting but when I run locale, I get:

Code:

root@transponder:/mnt/sysrescuecd# locale
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

so I'm not sure why the script is complaining.

Any ideas?

JonathanGuthrie · 07-06-2018, 06:12 PM

The error message begins with the name of the program that is broken, that being "dialog" and it says that on line 130 in the loadlocale.c file, presumably part of dialog's source, it had an assertion fail. Dialog having an assertion failure would be why dialog isn't working. Note that it's running the special statically-linked dialog from the CDROM, and not the dialog you may have installed on your system.

The assertion itself seems to be checking the length of the array of time something or other (I'm not very familiar with locales) against some count of something. Perusing the source code (locales.c is part of glibc, and you can browse it without downloading it) leaves me...not very enlightened.

It doesn't work for me, either, and my entries are all "en_US.UTF8"

I tentatively conclude that there's an error either in the dialog that comes with systemrescuecd, or in the glibc that it was built with, or an incompatibility between one of the libraries that dialog needs, and which in turn rely upon glibc. I don't know what they are, though, without digging through the build process, and I'm not prepared to do that just yet.

I'm going to try V5.1.2 instead of 5.2.2

UPDATE

No, that gives me the same error. A thought I had was that perhaps it was the UTF8 that was the issue, so I tried becoming root and issuing an "export LANG=POSIX" which gave me a different error. Progress! Now it says "Error opening terminal: xterm-256color" so how about I just go "export TERM=xterm" and it all works.

To be clear, I did "sudo bash" then in that session all three of the commands "export LANG=POSIX" "export TERM=xterm" and "bash usb_inst.sh"

It also works if I use the en_us.iso88591 locale that I just installed for this test. It looks like an issue with UTF8 handling in glibc.

Hope this helps.

jefro · 07-06-2018, 06:55 PM

Hopefully you did a md5 checksum of the ISO image you downloaded first.

A) Recommended USB installation method from Linux using isohybrid

If you are running Linux on your computer and have isohybrid installed it is very easy to install SystemRescueCD on a USB stick. You just have to download the ISO image of SystemRescueCd, and then run isohybrid to prepare the ISO image for booting from an USB stick. The prepared iso image can then be written to an USB stick using dd. Writing to the USB stick with dd will remove all its content, so make sure you don’t need the data or make a backup first.

Download the latest SystemRescueCd ISO image from the download page
Run isohybrid /path/to/systemrescuecd-x86-x.y.z.iso. This will modify the iso in place.
Plug in your USB stick and wait 5 seconds to allow enough time for the system to detect it
Unmount the USB stick if auto-mount is enabled or if it was already mounted
Run dd if=/path/to/systemrescuecd-x86-x.y.z.iso of=/dev/sdx in a shell where sdx is the USB stick

JonathanGuthrie · 07-06-2018, 09:03 PM

The isohybrid method of making a bootable USB stick was the very first thing I tried, and did not work for me. At all. I understand it worked perfectly for you. That's awesome. When I attempted to boot from the USB stick I made precisely in the manner that you describe, it brought up the boot menu, then asked for the keyboard type, and then it did some stuff and then reported that it was unable to find "sysrcd.dat" and that it was dumping me into a limited shell.

It was my attempt to use the second method of making the USB stick which brought me here looking for an explanation of the error I got with that method, only to find that I actually understood what was going on and could explain it to the others here. So I did.

Since then, I've actually been using the USB stick with the rescue stuff on it. I'm pretty sure that the data I want is available, but I'm not quite to where I can get it.

arcarius · 04-13-2019, 10:59 AM

I'm sorry for resurrecting a necrothread, but let me give my answer for the Googlers out there.

My problem was that usb_inst.sh can't use my current LOCALE (who knows why, but I don't care to fix it). Set your LANG to the generic C locale and it should work. At least, it worked for me. It also didn't know my xterm-256color TERM, so I had to set it back to xterm.

Code:

export LANG=C
export TERM=xterm
./usb_inst.sh dialog