FC3t3 install: parted assertion failures, hang at very early boot

Jim Cornette fct-cornette at sbcglobal.net
Sat Oct 16 02:08:11 UTC 2004


Colin Walters wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I tried installing FC3t3 on my home x86_64 machine last night.  It had
> both FC2 and Windows 2000 installed as well, with about 40G of free
> space.
> 
> Very early in the installation, right before Anaconda gets to the stage
> of "Searching for existing Fedora Core installations", I get a number of
> assertion failure dialogs relating to the partition table that come from
> parted I believe.
> 
> Here's the anaconda log:
> http://verbum.org/files/anaconda.log
> 
> I meant to include the output of fdisk -l but forgot to save it :/
> 
> My guess is the issue has something to do with the trick you had to do
> to make Windows bootable after installing FC2.  I followed these
> instructions (or something like it):
> http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc2.shtml
> (Although the site appears to not be up now, maybe it will be familiar)
> 
> I ended up just nuking my entire partition table and reinstalling FC3t3
> over everything else, which seemed to work.  Except that after
> rebooting, my machine hung at "Verifying DMI Pool Data......", before
> even grub had started.  Some sort of grub problem?
> 
> So I booted into rescue mode, and did this:
> mount -o bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev # bug 135860
> chroot /mnt/sysimage
> grub-install '(hd0)'
> 
> Then I get this output repeatedly:
> Unknown partition table signature
> 
> After about 15 seconds grub-install appears to complete successfully,
> and after rebooting it boots FC3t3 fine.

I've had this happen for computers that I repaired. Most of the time it 
was related to failed hardware, such as disks. Other times resetting the 
data in BIOS corrected this error. W2K machines usually failed with this 
error. Other times, a virus on other windows operating systems wrecked 
the disk.

I take it that you did not do anything physically inside the computer? 
Loose cables might caue this problem also.

There are many different links to this problem on the internet. I 
searched for this problem before and found some useful info. The search 
might find more useful docs.

http://www.duxcw.com/faq/computer/dmi.html




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