Installing Fedora from ISO Images

[Rick Stevens]

David Hunt wrote:
> Here is a bit of a follow-up from the second install attempt:
> 
>         On the first install I selected the "Automatic Partition" option,
> and got the following warning. "boot partition /boot may not meet booting
> constraints for your architecture. Creation of a boot disk is highly
> encouraged." Interesting that I have gotten this message from Red Hat 8.0
> (purchased retail version) and now the Fedora installation. A problem to
> tackle another day I imagine. I am wondering if the /boot partition needs to
> be located within a special area of the disk space. I have successfully
> loaded SuSE and Mandrake with my current partitions.

The warning is issued because old BIOSes required the boot partition
to begin on cylinder 1023 or less of your hard disk.  Old versions of
LILO and some other boot loaders still have this limitation.  It's
caused by a limitation from the old CHS (cylinder-head-sector) method
of specifying disk geometries.  They used a 16-bit number to hold boot
information, and only 10 bits of it were used to specify the cylinder
(0x3FF = 1023 decimal).  With newer BIOSes and GRUB, you may safely
ignore that warning.

>         With the automatic option Fedora created 3 partitions (/boot, / ,
> /swap). Unfortunately it was corrupted badly enough that even PartitionMagic
> refused to launch. Why? I don't know. With the Mandrake installer, I was
> able to delete these partitions, and replace them with a single (/)
> partition. After that PartitionMagic launched, and I created a 2GB
> Journalised FS : ext3 partition, and placed the .ISO files there. Ran
> md5sum, still looked good.
> 
>         I re-installed Mandrake, and followed all of the steps of the
> previous install, except that I chose the manual partition option, to keep
> my single partition (/). This time with the ISO files on a second ext3
> partition (not FAT32), everything appeared to be OK. The installation ran
> all the way through to the post-install configuration. Yehaaa!!! But, don't
> pull out the beer just yet, then it crashed as follows:
> 
> mini-wm: fatal io error 2 (connection reset by peer) on x server :1.0
> the application "anaconda" lost its connection to the display :1.0
> most likely the X server was shut doun or you killed/destroyed the
> application
> install exited abnormally
> sending termination signals...
> 
> without completing the post-intall config, the bootloader wasn't set up, so
> while I have solved the "install from ISO files" issue, thanks to all of you
> for your help, I havn't yet successfully loaded Fedora. Does anyone
> recognoze the error above? I'm afraid that I can stil use some help.

It appears you have an X issue.  Badly behaving X drivers can hose
your system right in the middle of the disk partitioning system's
writing to the disk--hence giving you a corrupted partition table.
It'd help if we knew what your system has in it (mobo, processor,
video card, network card, RAM, etc.).

I'd recommend you try the install again, but install in text mode--not
in graphic mode ("boot: text").  If that works, then we can work on
getting X functional.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  What's small, yellow and very, VERY dangerous?  The root canary!  -
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