Error Installing - An Unknown Error Has Occurred

[EverydayDiesel]

Boot in rescue mode and try running dmraid -r -E /dev/sda and see if that helps. Please make sure there is no useful data on the disk before you try that!

Thats IT!!!!

Thanks

Everything is installed now. Are there any implications from doing this?

[gerald_clark]

That removed the RAID metadata friom the drive.

[EverydayDiesel]

Hello Again.

I am installing centos 7 on another computer with no raid controller and I am getting the same error.

I have tried installing from both the regular install (all default options) and also tried it with "dmraid -r -E /dev/sda" but either way I get an unknown error has occurred when installing the boot loader.

I did notice at boot it gives me "dracut-initqueue[628]: mount: /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only" which may be a clue. The drive is a 512 gig ssd card.

[Locane]

I typed up a much longer post that got lost because this window timed out on me before I could finish it. Frustrating.

The short version is:
• I had the same problem
• "grub2-install" was being called to install on the wrong device
• The device it was trying to (erroneously) install itself to had no disk label, so it threw a generic error and failed
• My problem was solved by specifying the device the bootloader should install to in my kickstart file:

Code: Select all

bootloader --location=mbr --boot-drive=sdc --append="pcie_aspm.policy=performance

Things I've found helpful in the past troubleshooting blinking cursor:

• Reducing number of attached disks to minimum
• Using dd to wipe the beginning and end of a disk - that should kill RAID meta data and anything else that was on it, then reinstalling
• Using parted to create a new disk label and then reinstalling

Hope this helps somebody.

[eric8180]

Here's a workaround.

I had a blank screen with a blinking cursor after the initial install/reboot. I was installing Centos 7 on an HP Elite 8000 tower, didn't matter if it was in AHCI or Raid mode. Just one hard drive and a Sata DVD drive. What made it work was removing the 300gb Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive and installing a old 80 gig 7200.10 Seagate sata drive I had had laying around, it reinstalled successfully in ahci mode. Both hard drives were old fashion 512 bytes per sector (NOT advanced format hard drives).

Maybe the boot loader is having issues installing on large capacity hard drives, though 300 gigs by today's standards isn't that large...

This is for a home server for cold storage, I plan on adding several terabyte drives as data volumes so for me 80 gigs for the OS volume is fine.

[shaun8421]

I had this problem, I deleted the VM, created a new VM, and re-installed. Works fine now.

[heyalda]

POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION
Boot with a disk tool and delete the existing partitions on your disk(s).
I would think that the linux install would not crash due to preexisting partitions on the SSDs, but it did.
Deleting the partitions with a disk utility tool removed the unknown error for me.

THE DETAILS
I was getting this error too on a Dell Studio 540 that has two 128GB SSD (forget the brand).
I had a previous linux installation from the same CentOS bootable DVD that I already verified the SHA for integrity and used it to install on that same machine (CentOS7 x86_64 DVD 1511).

I was reinstalling with a minimal install after having some issues with the mount points and partitioning that were kind of weird.
The previous installation used a software stripped raid 0. The partitioning in the install would not let me install on just one disk. It said that sda depends on sdb. But the bios was set to ATA and not RAID... so the installation was inspecting the disks and deciding that they must still be in a software raid.

The first failure occurred after clicking the continue install button to install the minimal installation.
But after that I would get the Unknown Error Has Occurred dialog immediately after the main install GUI is displayed.
I tried the other suggestion in the form to add dmraid -r -E /dev/sda to the install, but that did not work.

But after I used MiniTool Partition Wizard bootable CD to delete the partitions from the two SSD, I then was able to successfully install without the Unknown Error Dialog.
I also was able to install on just one of the SSDs, which is what I wanted in the first place.
Hope this helps someone else that had the same problem that I had.