[Server-devel] mkusbinstall fails

[David Leeming]

Martin

This machine does not have a CD drive (see attached - it is the one we
intend to trial for remote sites). Pia has told me that 0.5.1 does install
OK. I am in Solomon Islands and I have rung around, there is no external CD
drive available in any stores here and no-one I know has one.

So I have to use USB or NFS. I did set up NFS and it found the folder but
same error "this folder does not appear to contain...." 

We have been through the partitioning business, it is showing up fine in
fdisk and partition editor - a single bootable FAT16 partition, and I can
see the contents on Ubuntu and on Windows.

So, the only way forward is to solve the mkusbinstall.  

Now, ****** will mkusbinstall run on the XS? ****** What I can do is use the
Ubuntu machine with does have a CD drive and which I have previously
installed the XS many times. Then we can be sure of running things in the
same way....




David Leeming
Technical Advisor, People First Network, Honiara, Solomon Islands
Alternative email address: leemingdavid at yahoo.com.au 



-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Langhoff [mailto:martin.langhoff at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, 16 February 2009 3:31 p.m.
To: David Leeming
Cc: server-devel at lists.laptop.org; Pia Waugh
Subject: Re: mkusbinstall fails

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:22 PM, David Leeming
<leeming at pipolfastaem.gov.sb> wrote:
> Pia (very kindly) sent me the hardware with the very same USB stick
> pre-configured with 0.5.0. It booted and started the installation fine,
but
> failed right at the end with an exception error that we decided was due to
> hardware.

If you've seen that error, it's a good hint that the HW won't like
being installed from USB (at least with the 0.5.x images). I've seen
it on various machines. Burning CDROMs is the answer :-/

> What about the mkusbinstall errors as in the ***** attached jpeg ******?

Those errors are coming from a plain old "copy file X to the usb disk"
-- the kernel it's telling that writing to that disk failed. The
copies are done using the cp command, as vanilla as it gets. So
probably something wrong in the fdisk partitioning and filesystem
setup for the usb stick _or_ the usb stick being flakey (but you've
said it's not).

[ It's unfortunate that USB installs are hit-and-miss with F-9 stuff... ]



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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