CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

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fusion809
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CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

Post by fusion809 » 2018/01/24 03:23:48

Hi,

I would like to give CentOS 7.4 1708 a try on my actual machine for the first time (I have successfully installed CentOS several times in virtual machines though). Anaconda doesn't seem to want to play nice with me, as when I elect to partition my disks manually it crashes. When I have successfully installed it to VMs I just let it automatically configure the disk I wanted it installed to, but on my actual machine I wanted to customize the size and location of my root partition. This is not the first time Anaconda has crashed on me, I have found it very temperamental when I've installed Fedora on my actual machine in the past. The log I generated is too big for me to attach it to this thread, so here it is in a gist: https://gist.github.com/113f750a420181e ... c36388bcdd. Should I file a bug report or is this something you good folks can help me with?

Thanks for your time,
Brenton

desertcat
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Re: CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

Post by desertcat » 2018/02/01 07:18:18

OK I'll give this a try... maybe: Are you trying to partition a real PHYSICAL disk, or a VIRTUAL disk?!? If it is a PHYSICAL disk that would be odd since I have partitioned my 500 GB SSD manually:

/boot
/
/usr
/home
/var
/tmp
/vm4
/backup
swap

... each of these partitions I assigned a fixed size. Now if you are trying to partition a VIRTUAL disk that's a horse of a different color. For a Virtual disk I allow the installer to do what it wants usually because the VM is a fixed size vastly smaller than the physical disk and you want to maximize all the space. So Let's see if you are talking about a PHYSICAL disk or not. If you are then *maybe* I can help you as I have partitioned my disks manually like forever.

fusion809
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Joined: 2018/01/24 03:06:21

Re: CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

Post by fusion809 » 2018/06/20 14:42:11

An actual disk it was. In a VM I can easily install CentOS 7.4, without any crashes, it's outside a VM with an actual disk that things get irritating.

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TrevorH
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Re: CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

Post by TrevorH » 2018/06/20 15:11:14

Do your disks have residual fakeRAID metadata on them? Are they set up to use AHCI in your BIOS? Are they currently partitioned? Do they contain any strange (unusual) filesystems?
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

tunk
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Re: CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

Post by tunk » 2018/06/20 15:24:15

CentOS 7.5 has been released in this period and may have updates that fixes your problem.

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TrevorH
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Re: CentOS 7.4 1708: Anaconda crashes when I elect to partition my disk manually

Post by TrevorH » 2018/06/20 15:31:51

So looking at your log, it appears that everything you use is btrfs.

I do see that you have what appears to be an EFI boot partition and that raises some questions. Did you tell it that it needed to use that EFI partition? What are you booting from in order to install CentOS? If it's a USB stick, what did you use to create that USB stick? Did you sha256sum the iso image you downloaded and compare it to the ones we publish in the release notes to make sure the original download was OK?

Some USB stick utilities try to be clever and they rewrite the iso image as they copy it. Most of those proceed to break the CentOS isos. One of the ways in which they break it is by removing the UEFI boot code from it so that when you boot it on a UEFI system, it fails to boot in UEFI mode and falls back to legacy BIOS mode. This then gets very confused about the way things are laid out and will break any existing UEFI aware o/s's that are already installed.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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