Debian Installation :: Disk Partitioning Consistently Triggers Computer Restart
Jan 3, 2016
I'm trying to perform a clean installation of 8.0.0-i386 from a CD. Seven consecutive attempts all result in the same issue: Almost immediately after commiting the disk partitioning settings (i.e., to begin formatting), the computer does a hard restart. I have tried doing the partitioning as early as possible in the installation process, just in case the system is running out of memory; I have also tried using the lowmem option. I suspect the problem may be related to my very old hardware...
Micronics serverboard 440BX chipset*
Dual Pentium II 450MHz CPUs*
1GB ECC RAM*
Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI adapter
IBM Ultrastar 36GB UW-SCSI HDD
ATAPI CD-ROM
Matrox G100 AGP video card*
*starred items are all original parts from an Intergraph server with validation/verification stickers attesting to their intercompatibility
No POST errors, the HDD passed verification using the Adaptec ROM utility, all unnecessary hardware removed
Could it be that I need an older release or some custom-compiled kernel? The only thing I could come up with on the web was that a lot of people have a similar failure with modern distros on non-PAE CPUs, but the P-II should not be susceptible to this problem.
This has now happened with 3 computers. I boot the i386 iso on a usb stick and I enter my name fine and create an account with a password, and then after the time is checked, the installation gets halfway through the hard disk bar and then suddenly it freezes. Sorry if i'm a little unspecific, I've forgotten what the name of the process was exactly and I don't want to have to try again if unnecessary.
What is the recommended method these days for command line partitioning and formatting for the Terabyte size hard disk.?
It was easy to keep up when your working or have access to hardware for re-purposing, but that has all dried up and my knowledge has been left behind. The problem(s) are with new, recent hardware
Following a crash from a now detectable faulty stick of RAMM, I've lost one of my data hard disks and my fiddling with replacement seems to leave various errors/warnings mainly about GPT not supported and this message is still present despite trying fdisk, cfdisk, gpart, gparted, and(?).
System is an ASUS mobo using SATA drives (root 500Gb: MBR+3 partitions;/, swap, /home), and two 2.4TB with single partitions.
After 6 months or so I noticed my 9.10 install getting sluggish and it started to freeze habitually. I let it go until one day it consistently froze at the startup login screen. I installed 10.04 and the problem continued - After first installing it worked for about 6 hours without a crash, and then once again the problem developed into consistently freezing at the login screen.
I tested with some USB Live sessions and my live sessions never froze, even when active for a whole day. Remembering some I/O BAD SECTOR error messages from my 9.10 crash, I determined the error may be with the hard drive so I bought a new Hitachi SATA hdd (needed more GBs anyway). I installed 10.04 on the new hdd (H and after 6 hours again it crashed. When it crashes the screen freezes for about 3 seconds and then the graphics wildly split and it's just a jagged gray screen. However, as time has gone on over the past 2 days, the freezing situation has been better in that it hasn't come to the point where the computer consistently freezes on the login screen. The time before it freezes has varied from 10 minutes to 6 hours.
I think it's maybe a software issue with the nvidia drivers. I'm having trouble diagnosing this bug or providing information. I've included the output of lspci -vvv I have the nVidia GeForce Go 6100 graphics card
When you paratition the disk on windows, it leaves all your documents on it, right?
There, there's 49% left. IF I set Ubuntu to 48% of the disk, would it destroy the files that are on the right 48% of the disk? Or, does it not matter if you defragment
That's not my hard drive deframenting, it's just one I found on the web. It's rather small at 4 GB.
I want to create several virtual machines based on a minimal (no GUI) Ubuntu installation. I'm using VirtualBox (on Windows 7), the VMs are being created with 256MB RAM and using the Ubuntu Minimal CD Image [URL]. Because I want 4-5 of these virtual machines I want to use minimal disk space for storage too, which means restricting the virtual hard disk size for each. My first attempt was to limit it to 300MB, but when I got to the partitioning section of the installer it would not allow me to do automatic partitioning and forced me to do manual partitioning, it did moan about the size of the disk.
So I started again with a 1GB virtual hard disk, this time the installer was quite happy to do the automatic partitioning. My question is how small can I make my virtual hard disk without having to do manual partitioning? I don't have a problem with doing the partitioning manually but for easiness I just want to do it automatically and find it strange the acceptable size isn't mentioned anywhere (that I could find).
Just bought a new computer that I will use as server: Gigabyte 890GPA-UD3H motherboard AMD Phenon II 1090T 16 Gb RAM 4 x Seagate 2Tb hard disks
I tried to install Ubuntu server 10.04 and 10.10, both 64 bit, having similar results. Also I have tried enabling and disabling the RAID card. On 10.04 installer hangs preparing disk partitioning phase at 43%, on 10.10 hangs at the same stage 45%. Must I download something and apply before that phase?
To structure the layout of my partitions. I'm installing Windows 7, Backtrack 4 R2 and Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop on my laptop. I've got a 500 GB HDD named sda.
I've already installed Windows 7. It's my opinion that it's easiest to begin with Windows.
The partitions look like this right now:
The Windows installation is unencrypted and I want it to stay that way. It's only there in case my laptop gets stolen, I've installed various nasty things there.
The Backtrack 4 installation will also be given 100 GB space, I want it to be encrypted. The Ubuntu installation should get the rest of all the remaining space and preferably be encrypted but it's not 100% necessary.
How I should partition this? There's a limit on 4 primary partitions? How do I circumvent this? There should be one dedicated GRUB partition which will point to each of the installations own boot loaders?
I have a slight problem. I think it is corrupted file(s).
My Debian Testing KDE is not functioning properly. When I Leave and click Restart Computer, the computer does not go to a reboot but goes to the KDE login screen. When I cold boot the computer and click Restart Computer from the KDE login window, the same thing happens, the login window reappears.
When I choose Turn Off Computer, the computer properly powers down.
It looks like I should re-install something but what that something is I don't know. I checked the boot and dmesg logs. Nothing leaps of the screen at me but I have to admit that I am not 100% sure what I am looking for.
Have tried to install 10.04 from a cd sent to me by ubuntu. lts on an x-windows medion pc mt7 (med mt 345). Previously comp. was running windows xp pro. After pressing restart at end of install process I get nothing! Black screen, no mouse control , no keyboard control, nothing at all.
Have tried putting cd in again but get nothing, on pressing restart the cd was politely ejected. Have tried rebooting a few times but get no response. Everything is switched on. So now I cannot even get a terminal up, the only thing I am fairly certain about is that the computer is sending a signal to the screen as there is Not a "no signal" message.
After entering an aptitude command: Processing triggers for shared-mime-info ... Unknown media type in type 'all/all' Unknown media type in type 'all/allfiles' Unknown media type in type 'uri/mms' Unknown media type in type 'uri/mmst' Unknown media type in type 'uri/mmsu' Unknown media type in type 'uri/pnm' Unknown media type in type 'uri/rtspt' Unknown media type in type 'uri/rtspu' Unknown media type in type 'fonts/package' Unknown media type in type 'interface/x-winamp-skin'
Note that '/usr/share' is not in the search path set by the XDG_DATA_HOME and XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variables, so applications may not be able to find it until you set them. The directories currently searched are: - /root/.local/share - /opt/kde/share - /opt/kde/share - Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme ...
I am trying to install Debian Lenny on my iMac. When the installer menu comes to the partitioning scheme, I have no choice other than "manual partitioning".
Based on what I have read so far, I think I need to have at least two partitions:
- a root partition (/) but for how much space I am not so sure yet
- a swap partition equal to the amount of my RAM (which in this case is 2 GB DDR3): is this correct?
I wonder if I should furthermore make a "free space" (around 1 GB) and a boot partitions as well. Should I make any further partitions?
I want to devote some 50 GB of space to Debian so how the rest of this space should be partitioned: that is, when I am done with root, swap, free space, and boot, I am still left with a considerable amount of space.
I have a Intel DH67CL motherboard with UEFI support(and updated to latest BIOS). I have connected a 180GB Intel 330 SSD into my system so as to install Debian testing.
Presently, a 160GB sata hard drive is connected along with SSD and is used to boot default OS.
1. I am planning to do GPT partitioning. I am totally new to GPT partitioning. from what I understands, It needs some mandatory partitions like ESP. My doubt is, in a SSD solely booting Linux, will I need to create separate /(root) and /home and /data partitions? Also, I plan to use /var/log and some other frequently updated directories moved into existing harddrive.
So, what is the partitioning order - is this fine - ESP(512MB), /boot(100MB), /(30GB), /home(50GB) and /DATA(50GB) and remaining 16-17GB for over provisioning for the SSD?
2. is there a need to have 128MB MSR(microsoft reserved) in the case of Linux
3. With gdisk or parted for creating partitions? how to verify if partitions are aligned. In GPT, only primary partitions are supported?
4. Some answers in askubuntu/superuser says ext4 is not really good for SSD, instead take JFS? is this true? Is Btrfs mature enough to use with Desktop system
5. Which bootloader? gdisk creator Roderick is pushing for rEFInd or gummyboot instead of GRUB2.
6. In my PC, 4GB RAM is available with a core i3 processor. Shall I mount /tmp in RAM? Will I need to specify the size of RAM when mounting using /etc/fstab? A size of 1GB is fine?
Although it's worked very consistently in the past, since moving to the newer kernels (3.16 or 4.0) on strech/sid, resuming from hibernation seems to randomly work -- sometimes it loads the image from swap, but other times it simply does a fresh boot. To troubleshoot, I've increase the size of swap and then updated 'fstab', the initramdisk, and grub -- but still no reliable behavior...
So I am helping a friend (computer n00b) to install Debian Squeeze over the telephone, since his Vista had crashed, and after we set up the partitions like so:9 GB /1GB swap 150 GB /homeIt "hangs" for a while, i.e. nothing happens, and then it says that it "failed to partition disks". It did not give any error codes, and I did not see the message first hand, since I was doing it over the phone, but I was thinking that there is something wrong with the hard drive (causing Vista to crash perhaps?) so could this be circumvented by just using the first (or last) 10-15 GB of the disk?
So, I've got as far as partitioning the hard disks on my Sun Ultra 450 Enterprise system, but it always fails with:
SILO (Sparc Linux Loader) can only boot the kernel off of a disk with the "sun" partition table. In the current partitioning scheme the kernel is going to be installed on the /boot partition located on a disk with the partition table of type "msdos".
What is this error message trying to say in its ambiguous way?
I selected automatic partitioning, but it got me to the same place as manual partitioning before it failed in the same way.
I installed four used hard drives in this system - they may have come from PCs for all I know. However, they are SCSI SCA drives, which makes it hard for me to believe they came from a PC environment.
If they did, do I need to to a low-level (or high-level) format of these drives to wipe out the "msdos"ness of them? If so, how do I do that in the SILO installer?
I'm new to the Debian, but not to Linux. I've previously used Ubuntu for a few years, so I know something about how a successful installation should look like. I'm currently using Windows 7.
I downloaded the debian-6.0.3-amd64-gnome-netinst.iso from [URL] ...., and then made a USB pendrive using the Windows version of Unetbootin. The MD5 sum for the .iso-file was the correct one, b663727d7f5b572c329cea8e2ff5e29c.
I used the usual non-graphical setup, without any special options. The installation process went without hiccups until the "Starting up the partitioner" -screen freezes at "Scanning disks...". The bar stops at 50%. It never progresses any farther, even after an hour. It doesn't give any errors either. After I pressed Alt+F4, the last lines were:
Code: Select allpartman:Â Â No matching physical volumes found partman:Â Â No volume groups found partman:Â Â Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... partman-lvm:Â Â No volumegroups found
Exactly the same happens with firmware-6.0.3-amd64-netinst.iso too, or any of the live versions I tried. The result of graphical installation was also nothing. The USB pendrive created by LinuxLive USB Creator was nonoperative in exactly the same way.
The computer is brand new, without any previous OS installations. My desktop computer has the following parts:
I have Jessie in a VM. For some days I have been consistently getting errors with apt-get update, no matter if I use httpredir of ftp.us. These are the errors:
Code: Select allErr http://ftp.us.debian.org jessie/updates/main amd64 Packages  404 Not Found [IP: 64.50.236.52 80] Err http://ftp.us.debian.org jessie/updates/contrib amd64 Packages  404 Not Found [IP: 64.50.236.52 80] Err http://ftp.us.debian.org jessie/updates/non-free amd64 Packages
[Code] ....
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
And this is the syntax in my /etc/apt/sources.list
Code: Select alldeb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main non-free contrib # deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free # deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free
# wheezy-updates, previously known as 'volatile' deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free # deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free
# Jessie Backports deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free
Mirrors cannot be down for so long, so what is going on?
My sid running fine for months until recently. It is now freezed more frequently. Brief looking at process I found kswapd0 constantly consume 50% cpu right after booting in, even when swap usage is only 3%.
Code: Select all$top top - 12:00:30 up 47 min, 2 users, load average: 2.11, 2.36, 2.40 Tasks: 155 total,  3 running, 152 sleeping,  0 stopped,  0 zombie %Cpu(s): 17.0 us, 59.1 sy, 1.2 ni, 20.4 id, 2.3 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem : 1868396 total,  695024 free,  656048 used,  517324 buff/cache KiB Swap: 4095992 total, 3972288 free,  123704 used. 1096476 avail Mem
[Code] ....
My current release is
Code: Select all$ uname -a Linux GlobeTravelers 4.4.0-1-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.4.6-1 (2016-03-17) x86_64 GNU/Linux $lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID:Â Â Debian Description:Â Â Debian GNU/Linux testing-updates (sid) Release:Â Â testing-updates Codename:Â Â sid
I have downloaded the latest version of Debian for PPC to run on my iMac G3 600MHz 1GB ram. The problem is, is when it is partitioning the HD the computer just shuts down and restarts from the beginning. I don't understand this. I chose it to erase and use the entire disk. The HD is 80GB. I really want to install this OS!
i currently have ubuntu server installed, where i host some files. now is it possible to create a new partition on my disk and move the data there, without resintalling the OS?if so, how?
root@kitsch:~# df -T Filesystem Type 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/kitsch-root
I have installed Debian Squeeze on my Laptop. Everything seems to start to work fine. The only think I am not sure is the hard disk click sound only when I shut down the computer. It happens right before the power is totally cutoff. I normally do not have this sound. I presume that this maybe due to the fact that the head goes back to original position but I am not sure. Is this normal?
I have a BIOS affected by 1024 cylinder limit ,,(Just to explain , the BIOS will recognize only 137GB no matter how big the HDD is (160/250/320/500))This problem doesnt affect the OS in any way --Linux can read the entire disk and so can WIN after SP1 of XP...This problem is only upto the point of MBR handing over boot instructions to Bootloader..In that case LiLo or Grub1 or Grub2 would fail if the kernel of the OS is after the 137GBI want to know if I can mix 2 partitioning schemes..Say use MSDOS partitioning till the limit of say 100 GB and for the rest 60 GB use GPT partitioning and install GRUB2 (as I read only GRUB2 supports GPT cleanly) ...Then , maybe I can do away with options of restricting /boot within 137
I have a desktop which has 10.04 loaded. There are apparently some errors as some of the menu items didn't load correctly, and after a while, it freezes showing a pink and purple screen with vertical lines. This is not a dual-boot setup. I have a new 10.04 disk which I have tried to boot from to simply over write it with a fresh install but the computer will not boot from the disk.
I'm trying to install Debian Jessie beta2 on a UEFI laptop. The installation worked just fine before with setting in manual partitioning an EFI system partition and a root partition.But when I try to partition with root as an encrypted volume I get this error when I wanna write changes to disk:" the attempt to mount a file system with type vfat in scsi1 partition sda at /boot/efi failed"When I choose resume partitioning the installer then freezes at "detect file systems".
Because my harddrive needs specific alignment I've made beforehand in gdisk:EFI System Partition of 100mib at /dev/sda1/boot partition of 512mib at /dev/sda2/ (because I expect the installer to want a /boot too for an encrypted device)rest of harddrive reserved for root at /dev/sda3
I would like to create a custom boot disk that would include some programs already installed on my computer, so I wouldn't have to re download them, is there a way to do this?
When I restart, GRUB sometimes doesn't start. It just hangs at the flashing cursor before grub.
When I restart again, grub works fine. The flashing cursor shows at the top of the screen for a few seconds, and then there is one or more new lines, and then the grub screen.
This is on an HP Pavilion 640 which is otherwise very stable.
I am testing release 10.10 of Ubuntu desktop from a USB boot drive. It looks great so far, and I am thinking of installing it on the machine. However, I would like to know the disk space requirements. I know I could look them up, Also, while working with the interface I accessed all of the machines devices from the Linux OS and saw that I could partition an existing partition. However, that houses the Windows XP SP3 installation and I was wondering if altering partition size would wipe its contents.
I would be awsome if I could dynamically alter the partition to the size required by Ubuntu plus some slack for applications and the like so I could have both OSs on the same machine without having to reformat the drive for dual boot and re-install both OSs.
