Troubles installing

[Member KouDy]

Hello all,
i am trying to install antiX 17.2 32-bit on Alix 3D3 (single board PC, quite old one). So i created usb flash disk, booted into live and ran install. I choose to use whole disk automatically. Later i chose both ways of placing grub (MBR and root). That ends the installation for me. After restart i get error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'. After much googling and attempts i am unable to move forward.
So i took the same ISO image and installed it in VirtualBox. The installer does not end by choosing location for grub but continues onward by creating user etc. This the problem that’s causing it i think, installer does not finish correctly.

Originally i suspected the compactflash card being corrupted but badblocks didn’t find anything wrong.

What can i do to fix this?

[Moderator caprea]

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Before an installation during the live-session run a
sudo apt-get update

and then
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This will upgrade the installer to the newest version.
Did you ?

If the installation is interrupted again after the grub-installation,
could you try to run the installer a second time ?

[Member KouDy]

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I tried that but i end up with all sorts of errors related to going out of space. I could fix some but eventually they just lead to another.

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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How much hard drive space do you have?

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Anonymous]

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I’ve no great ideas but, I always have (sometimes quiet radical) PRACTICAL workarounds.

Let us see the facts:

1. Problem installing on HD, probably because of size or age
2. Old, SLOW HD (very probably 2 ~ 10 GB, PARALLEL)
3. HW that was junk 10 ~ 15 years ago
4. WORKING & BOOTABLE USB port

My workaround:

1. (If your HW is worth some ~15 $ to you…) Get a decent SMALL pen drive (32 GB USB-Stick, approx. 15 $)
2. Make yourself a persistent pen drive which will keep all your changes and can be remasterd
(There’s a great video on YouTube on that topic, from AntiX Guru Dolphin_Oracle)
3. Let it run from USB and use the HD as a bonus storage
(Use Gparted to formate it with XFS)

[Member KouDy]

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I am using 4GB USB drive for live boot (which leaves there something like 3GB of space).
Installation destination is 32GB compact flash card.

Space problem i get is not with destination, it’s with live drive. It loads, i would create some temporary space to mount it into /var/cache/dpkg/archives and apt-get update works.
apt-get upgrade will not finish. At this point i am still before even launching the installer.

[Anonymous]

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Simply make the live boot drive on your 32 GB drive and turn it into “Live USB WITH persistance” so you can update, upgrade and keep your data after restart.

—

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by anticapitalista. Reason: shrunk videos

[Moderator caprea]

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This is not normal behaviour, you should be able to upgrade the live-usb-stick.
How did you create the usb-stick?
Did you check the md5sum ?

[Anonymous]

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I have googled something after this Alix3D3 board…

The way you want to install antiX17 doesn’t work at all!

There are extensive preparations of the CF card; installation of the OS; BIOS of the Alix etc. necessary, before(!) you can transfer the CF card into the Alix.

Unfortunately I found only current German instructions for this… and I have no idea.
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Archiv/Alix/
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Alix/CF-Bootmedium_erstellen/
https://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

[Moderator caprea]

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Translation from the ubuntu-side

A fundamental difference in the available variants of ALIX boards is the presence (or absence) of a VGA output. Boards with VGA output are equipped with an award BIOS and therefore resemble a normal PC in many ways. An installation on these boards therefore hardly differs from the installation of another server.

ALIX boards without VGA output, on the other hand, are equipped with a serial interface and have a strongly function-reduced BIOS (tinybios), which can make the task difficult for the user, especially during the installation, as it is e.g. not able to start an operating system from a replaceable data carrier (stick, USB CD drive or hard disk).

Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator

I’m not sure if the OP is really affected here, as he mentioned to have already booted from the usb-stick.

[Member KouDy]

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caprea wrote:

This is not normal behaviour, you should be able to upgrade the live-usb-stick.
How did you create the usb-stick?
Did you check the md5sum ?

I used PowerISO (free version), also tried the Universal-USB-Installer. md5sum is matching on the iso yes.
Do you have any recommended software?

Anonymous wrote:

I have googled something after this Alix3D3 board…

The way you want to install antiX17 doesn’t work at all!

There are extensive preparations of the CF card; installation of the OS; BIOS of the Alix etc. necessary, before(!) you can transfer the CF card into the Alix.

Unfortunately I found only current German instructions for this… and I have no idea.
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Archiv/Alix/
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Alix/CF-Bootmedium_erstellen/
https://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

I am not sure if this applies to 3D3 because it has normal bios, boots like regular PC. For sure i will try to go through those links with some translator.

I am also going through the videos. Perhaps i will find something there.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by KouDy.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by KouDy.

[Moderator caprea]

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AFAIK rufus is recommended on windows
https://rufus.ie/en_IE.html

[Member KouDy]

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All right so i managed to install the system to CF from USB boot.
What did the trick was apparently that i unchecked GRUB option in 3rd step (i think it was 3rd step). I am not sure why this in particular is causing everything to fail.
But then i ended up with disk without grub (i guess). I guess i need to run apt-get install –reinstall grub-pc when chrooted to CF installation from live. So now after i solve not working network while chrooted it will maybe come to life. Or am i on completely wrong track here?

EDIT :
from live i mount –bind /sys /proc and /dev into /mnt (where /dev/sda1 is mounted)
then after chroot i get name or service not known when trying to ping google.com
there is /etc/resolv.conf when listing /etc (in chroot so really /mnt/etc/resolv.conf)
so from live again i tried mount –bind /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf which after chroot into /mnt doesn’t do anything

finally i figured the network by copying /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf into chroot, apt-get install –reinstall grub-pc worked fine but did not fix the boot from CF (again back to black screen with blinking underscore)

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by KouDy.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by KouDy.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by KouDy.

[Moderator caprea]

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It’s still strange that the installer didn’t install grub. Have you been able to update and upgrade during the live-session ?
Anyway , for installing grub in a chroot environment please try the following
Boot with the live-stick
I assume your installation is located on sda1

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev

sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys

sudo mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc

sudo cp /proc/mounts /mnt/etc/mtab

sudo chroot /mnt /bin/bash

grub-install /dev/sda

update-grub

exit

This should work, good luck !

[Member KouDy]

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All right so here’s what i did.
I manually prepared partitions, leave 2048 sectors free before first partition.
Installed antix (/home is in / ). All went fine. Then i mounted all things above, chrooted into /mnt , grub-install /dev/sda then update-grub . No errors, everything worked perfectly. After reboot i am back to square one with error: attempt to read or write outside of disk ‘hd0’. Trying to rescue doesn’t work again (insmod normal simply returns the same error).

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by KouDy.

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