Fedora Install failure.

[Karl_W_Lewis]

I feel like total noob, (which is odd, 'cause I ain't, really). I've been trying to get FC6 i386 onto an old dual K7 computer with little success. When I get through the install process, (and I've done it half a dozen times so far), the result is always the same: The system starts to boot but before it finishes it starts spewing errors. The first error seems to be something about :

touch /var/lib/random-seed no such file or directory
chmod 600 /var/lib/random-seed no such file or directory

and then it just starts scrolling too fast for me to read.

If I understand correctly, the kernel is trying to create a file and set it to r/w only for root. The file system does exist, it is capable of being mounted, (since the rescue cd can mount it), but it doesn't work from the initial boot....

The hardware is a [old] Tyan Tiger MP S2460 mobo with two processors and 1 GB of RAM. There are three ATA hard drives and I'm trying to put FC6 on the third drive, (hdd), (it's hdd because the CDROM is hdc), though grub and the /boot partion live on the first hard drive. The drive is partitioned as one big LVM, holding a number of Logical Volumes, for /, /var, /tmp, /opt, /usr, /usr/local. Swap lives on the first hard drive as well as home and /boot. The MBR is one the first drive as well, of course.

Is it intuitively obvious to anyone else what I'm doing wrong?
I've tried installing everything that I want all at once, I've tried doing a bare minimum text based install... the results are depressingly similar... not to say identical.

A similar install of FC6 x86_64 on a newer dual Opteron machine works just fine, thank you. For the most part the this computer that is giving me trouble is otherwise working, I have an OpenSuSE 10.0 install on the first drive... and I'm trying to get away for that one, but I don't want to give it up until I'm rather more certain I can get FC working.

Any thoughts would be welcome....
KWL

[Jman]

Yes it's trying to create a file, the file the random number generator saves its state to, actually.

/var/lib does exist, correct?

You might try a simpler partitioning setup, the default two LVs maybe.

[Karl_W_Lewis]

Thanks... before reading your post however, I tried something more drastic... I rearranged the interior of the computer such that the drive I was trying to put FC6 on is now the frist and only hard drive, and I left my partition arrangement roughtly the same, except that /boot, swap and /home are all on this drive as well. I'm afraid I ddin't simplify the LVs at all. BUt now it works just hte way I expected it to. [shrug] I guess it was a hardware problem.

Yes, /var/lib did exist, (I had even tried creating an empty random-seed file myself, as root, while booted running knoppix by way of a rescue CD, but that made no difference).

Anyway, it's all better now. The only problem is I can't dual boot with my old SuSE install. I can live with that, since this is working.

KWL