Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-autoinstall (83 mails)

[David Carter <dpc22@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Peter Schwenk wrote:

> While yast is running, it looks like it is trying to partition, format,
> and mount the partitions, but it isn't successful.

For what its worth, I ran into an almost identical problem this afternoon
with SuSE 9.1. I'm using:

    <partitioning config:type="list">
      <drive>
        <device>/dev/sda</device>
        <initialize config:type="boolean">true</initialize>
        <use>all</use>
        <partitions config:type="list">
          <partition>
            <mount>/</mount>
            <size>2g</size>
            <filesystem config:type="symbol">ext3</filesystem>
            <format config:type="boolean">true</format>
          </partition>
          <partition>
            <mount>swap</mount>
            <size>2gb</size>
          </partition>
          <partition>
            <mount>/var</mount>
            <size>2g</size>
            <filesystem config:type="symbol">ext3</filesystem>
            <format config:type="boolean">true</format>
          </partition>
          <partition>
            <mount>/spool</mount>
            <size>max</size>
            <filesystem config:type="symbol">ext3</filesystem>
            <format config:type="boolean">true</format>
          </partition>
        </partitions>
      </drive>
    </partitioning>

This configuration seems to works without any problems on 9.0.

The partitioning scheme generates a correct partition table under 9.1:

/dev/sda1   *           1       22337   179421921    5  Extended
/dev/sda5               1         262     2104452   83  Linux
/dev/sda6             263         524     2104483+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda7             525         786     2104483+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8             787       22337   173108376   83  Linux

But then bails out with the error message:

  "Could not format /dev/sda8.

   You can continue if you know what you are doing, but, to prevent
   damage to you filesystem it is safer to cancel and reboot."

As far as I can tell, the problem appears to be that something is failing
to create the device special file for /dev/sda8 (sda5, sda6 and sda7 are
all created without problems).

If I switch to a tty with a shell prompt and run the following by hand:

  mknod /dev/sda8 b 8 8

and then hit "retry" within YaST, everything works just fine. I also found
that if I boot into a rescue environment and clear out the partition table
by hand using fdisk, the following AutoYaST run works without problems.

-- 
David Carter                             Email: David.Carter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
University Computing Service,            Phone: (01223) 334502
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street,       Fax:   (01223) 334679
Cambridge UK. CB2 3QH.