F9 & F8 freeze on "transferring install image..." AND F9 "insufficient disk space"

[fashionhat]

I'm installing onto a Gateway MA3 notebook, a 40G hard drive (AMD processor, 1GB RAM)

when I install from the F8 or F9 DVDs, the installation freezes about a minute into "transferring install image to the hard drive" (during the first minute or so, the mouse works, then doesn't)

Again, this is the same for both Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 DVDs, when installing directly from the DVD.

Without resolving the above, i decided to circumvent it by installing from the hard drive.

I "cat"-ed the FC9 DVD image to my 29GB partition, to a file named "Fedora-9-i386-DVD.iso"

The installer seemed to find and use this file without a problem, and i went through the GUI install screens without a hitch:

"Checking dependencies ... " (about a minute)

then

"preparing transaction from installation source..." (progress bar finishes)

Then an error dialog with the following:

"There was an error running your transaction for the following reason(s): insufficient disk space."

Details:
You need more space on the following file systems:
3598 M on /

=================================

My "/" is the mount point for a 29GB partition, formatted in ext3, and containing at the moment only the 3.3GB iso file i produced (as stated above), which is in use

Help!!

thanks

Andrew

[fashionhat]

Perhaps I should have provided my partition scheme earlier:

partition blocks Id System Mount Point
/dev/sda1 9140953+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 192780 83 Linux /boot
/dev/sda3 1309297+ 82 Linux swap ... (swap)
/dev/sda4 28427017+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 28426986 83 Linux /

I did not format this HD from blank/clean state; I only moved, shrunk and modified existing partitions (using gparted and standard formatting utilities).

I don't think I need to clean-install/format the drive, do I?

given that I was able to mount and write to /dev/sda5 with no problems?

Once again, during F9 install, my "/" mount point is /dev/sda5, and, currently, df shows that /dev/sda5 has about 22GB available (I was a little off in my previous post)

Could this be some sort of "not seeing past a certain cylinder" issue? the only thing in this BIOS is "Large Disk Access Mode: ", which is either "DOS" or "Other". I have it on "Other".

Thanks again
andrew

[fashionhat]

1) it appears my hard drive was bad. Hence the halting at the "transferring install image", and other large file copying. All went well on a replacement drive

2) the "iso" image I rigged up myself (whose SHA1SUM, btw, does not match the official iso's) is perhaps the culprit of the second problem.

Does anyone know for sure? why would my own dvd iso image work as far as it did for me? And then fail with the "insufficient space" error ?

Did anyone else get "insufficient space" using the OFFICIAL dvd iso (installing from hard drive)?

thanks

andrew

[Seve]

Hello:

If you want to install from a Hard Drive then you must have the iso image on another partition .... other than the one you are installing to.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/instal...harddrive.html

Seve

[fashionhat]

Thanks, Seve. I guess this has always been the case? I've switched to the minimal partitioning scheme recently, collapsing several partitions ( "/", "/usr", "/var", "/tmp", etc.) into one. Strangely, i didn't think of the possibility that anaconda actually minded which partition exactly the iso's are sitting on.

One suggestion for developers, however: would it be too difficult to make the error message more accurate and specific? Add to it something like "Please ensure that your ISO files are not stored on the root, /usr, /var, or /tmp, etc. partition."

Actually, the installer could/should perhaps check and warn about the conflict prior to that -- on the screen where you set up your mount points in "create custom layout". At that point it already knows which partition has the ISO files (but currently doesn't say anything when you assign, say, a "/" mount point to that partition)

Thanks

Andrew