installation on reiserfs fails

[Witold Krakowski]

It is not possible to install if the / partition is reiserfs formatted. It was possible to install on reiserfs partitions in dapper.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

Thanks for your bug.

Are you using the live CD or the alternate CD?

How does the installation fail? What happens - are there any error messages?

Could you please attach /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman to this bug, by commenting on the bug's web page?

Thanks

[Kari Aliranta (kpaliran)]

Are you using the desktop-cd or the alternate install cd?

And what do you mean with "not possible to install"? Does the installer hang, or does it finish the installation, but the installed system won't boot?

Just asking, because with Edgy beta, when I installed the system on reiserfs partition, Gparted would not mark the partition as bootable, and when I booted, I just got a BIOS error message saying "could not find any active partition". Corrected the problem by using alternate install CD, running recovery mode and using cfdisk to set the boot flag on the system partition (just run "cfdisk /dev/yourharddrive"). A couple of highly similar bugs in Gparted were closed since then, so I didn't actually test it again...

[Witold Krakowski (wkrakowski-gmail)]

@ Caroline: The error message is: "No root file system" and it appears in the left bottom of the installer screen.

I attached the logs You asked about.

@Kari: see my comment above. The installer just shows this error message and that's it. It's not possible to proceed. I use the desktop cd. I heard that it should be possible installing on reiserfs with the alternate cd, but why not on desktop cd ?

[Witold Krakowski (wkrakowski-gmail)]

another log - /var/log/partman

[TLE (k-nielsen81)]

I can confirm this bug. I happens exactly as described above. When, during the installation process, I come to the point where I am supposed to appoint partitions to the different mount points, then if I choose a reiserFS partition as / then it simply tells me "No root file system".

Initially I thought that it might be a problem with the formatting as it is a "old" partition which I just reformatted before the install. So I tried to delete the partition entirely and create a new one but the result was the same. Eventually I gave up and just installed it on a ext3 partition instead. I'm affected by another quite serious bug which made my installation very difficult, so I wasn't quite in the mood to do a lot of bug searching and experimenting.

I think maybe this sounds most like a software bug (though I am by no means an expert) but just for the sake of comparison I'll list all the hardware and hardware related facts that might be of importance. Maybe you Witold could do the same so we can see if there any common points.

I was using the 32 bit desktop-cd (Edgy) but with a 64 bit AMD processor.
The reiserFS partition was one of quite a lot (I think 10 or 11) partitions on an extended partition.
I use SATA disks
The disks are on a RAID controller but I don't run them as RAID.
Anything else ?

[Witold Krakowski (wkrakowski-gmail)]

Hi, thanks for the comment. Could You also add logs, just as I did? maybe it can help.

[TLE (k-nielsen81)]

Actually no, because my system is installed now. And I would rather not try to recreate it on the partition where the system I currently use is installed. But my system is set up so I can have several versions of Linux installed, so I might me able to test it later, but it probably isn't going to be any time soon.

Could you post some of the same information as I did, so we can try to compare.

[Witold Krakowski (wkrakowski-gmail)]

There's no need to install the system to get the logs. It's enough to get until the point where you get the error message and then stop the installer and take log files.

I already gave my logs and info . see above messages.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. This is also bug 67130, and is fixed in Feisty.