I have successfully been playing with R6.02 on a test machine and today went to install it on my working machine as described in my signature. The first time I tried it seemed to get to the end of the install process (100%) but stopped and did not reboot itself. A manual reboot did not work. Any subsequent attempts to install only get as far a 2% when it's partitioning sda3. Checking other consoles it looks like it is in a loop. The screen shows It repeats this cycle only changing the serverauth number. I took the disk out and removed all partitions on it but the same thing keeps happening.

On another splashscreen verbose page it seems to get as far as loading the nvidia drivers 96** and then get the following message about 8 times and eventually an "ID "C7" respawning too fast" message.

I have tried a number of the options on the installation setup,
Specific hardware - Dragon 2 (as my machine is close to a Dragon 2 except for the video cards)
Debug modes - no splashscreen (I think)
but get the same result.

Can anyone help me? Fortunately I am installing on a new hard drive so my existing R5.5 still works fine. I unplug the existing drive while trying the installation just to make sure I don't stuff it up. The new drive is a WD 1000EARS if that is important.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Hi,

I am afraid it won't help so much; I saw two threads which have vague similarities:

endless loop : R6.01 to R6.02 update stuck-endless loop of updating schema
ID "C7" respawning too fast" message : [Closed] INIT: Id "c7" respawning too fast

Yes I did look at those posts also but could not see how they could help me. I cannot get far enough to get logs.

As an update I should also say that I am trying to do this using the plasma TV as monitor connected by DVI-D cable. I tried booting to a Ubuntu live CD with the new drive disconnected and the original connected. The boot failed saying that another server was running for display 0. Reconnecting the TV using vga rather than the DVI-D and the Ubuntu boot completed successfully.

I suppose I could try installing LinHES using the vga connection but I was hoping to keep the connections as finally intended to allow its display setup to work. If I do install using vga I could copy over the existing Xorg.conf.

Does anyone have a recommendation?

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

These low % failures while formatting usually indicate a problem with accessing the drive. They can also indicate an problem with the CD image or optical drive you're using for the install.

The first thing to look at is what drives are being seen at what device names. Something like "fdisk -l" should provide the details. To run it just boot from the CD and then switch to another virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F1 for console 1, Crtl-Alt-F2 for console 2, ...). Once you know what devices and partitions are available make sure you've selected the one you intended to.

Thanks tjc, I must admit I have been a bit suspicious of the CD drive so I will try an old spare one. The actual CD works on other computers.

Do you know if the installation should not object to how the computer is connected to the TV (DVI-d vs. VGA)?

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Latest update.

I tried another CD drive - same result.
I tried another CD drive cable - same result
I tried connecting to the TV by the vga connector - same result
I tried using an LCD monitor instead of the TV - same result

I am trying to install to a new clean disk so the entire disk is available for the installation. "fdisk -l" showed me the 3 partitions (sda1, 2 and 3) generated by the installation.

Is it having a problem with my Gigabyte 7300GS video card?

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

I tried again on the weekend but was unsuccessful. I did however find the the following logs in /tmp in RAM.
mv_debug.log
mv_status.log
mythvantage_install.log
x.log
The first 3 show no errors or problems and the last entry in each is "Starting format of sda3"
The entire x.log looks like
Does this mean anything to anyone? I have tried to investigate this error message and have determined that others have had similar messages due to the keyboard (mine is cordless) or the remote (Streamzap) so perhaps I will try another keyboard and no remote. All the other posts I have looked at refer to during operation not installation.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Those don't look fatal, it's just the X server looking for keyboards and mice. To be doubly sure you can minimize the input devices and just plug in a PS2 or USB keyboard and mouse.

However, I really think you need to focus on the identity of the drives. If you can boot the CD and get to a console, make sure that /dev/sda is _really_ your hard drive. A sure way to have formatting fail is to have it trying to write to the wrong device, like say your CD/DVD drive, or an all in one card reader with no media installed, or...

This is *FAR* more likely with the new kernels which like to map all storage devices into /dev/sd* names so that they can be accessed uniformly using the SCSI emulation layer.

So look at what device it's reading the CD image from, if the CD is mounted on /dev/sda you have your smoking gun. Look at how the drives are being identified. If you have a Samsung DVD drive and a WD hard drive, and /dev/sda says it's a SanDisk device, /dev/sdb says it's a Samsung device, and /dev/sdc says it's a WD device you have your smoking gun.

I will have another look tonight, but I seem to remember when I tried "fdisk -l" all I saw was the 3 partitions on the hard drive and no sign of the DVD drive. Is that right or does that indicate a problem?

I have determined by booting with an Ubuntu disk, that Mythvantage had managed to partition the hard drive correctly, and that sda1 and 2 had been formatted to ext and swap respectively but sda 3 was unformatted. I was able to format sda3 to xfs with gparted in Ubuntu, but that doesn't help the installation process.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

I can confirm that "fdisk -l" only shows the 3 partitions on the hard drive.

I think I may have narrowed it down to the new hard drive. I plugged it into my test machine and got the same result. When I connect a old PATA drive I can install successfully. The test machine also has a SATA drive onto which I have successfully loaded R5.5. I also tried loading R5.5 and R5F1 onto the new drive and again the process stops whilst formatting sda3.

Are there any settings/jumpers I should be using? When on my test machine I have to use a jumper to slow the new drive down to SATA 1 speeds, otherwise it doesn't see the drive.

Is the drive faulty? Once formatted it seems to behave normally.(edit) Also I successfully loaded Ubuntu onto it.

Is there a manual approach to get me past the formatting stage of the installation? I can format with gParted instead.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Does it show them as /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and dev/sda3? The identity of the disks is critical. Try this:

I was a little fried the other day and couldn't remember it off the top of my head.

We have seem problems with older motherboards and SATA drives in previous releases, sometimes fiddling with the BIOS settings helped, other times people couldn't get past it.

Thanks for your advice on this.

fdisk gives the following
hdparm -i /dev//[hs]d[a-h] gives the following:

The above outputs were transcribed from a photograph of the screen so there may be some typos. I was not able to mount a usb stick to save the outputs directly.

The existing 500GB drive is SATA and works fine with R5.5. The BIOS currently selects ACHI mode. Could I try RAID mode even though I am not using RAID? I assume IDE mode would not work for a SATA drive.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest

Don't know if it might be related, but I had this trouble (freezing at 2% or 3% partitioning/Starting format) when installing LinHES from CD using an IDE optical drive to a SATA hard drive. Switching to a SATA optical drive, or using the USB thumb drive install image:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20354

both got around it for me. It seemed to be something with the mix of IDE optical drive and SATA HD.

Interestingly if nicom has an optical drive it's not showing up in the hpparm output. The drive identified as sda looks like a WD 1Gb unit, but it seems to be all by itself.

When I run the hdparm command it shows 3 drives (2 HD, one DVD) with the third one identified as:


Nicom - what type of drive are you installing from?

It's a LITE-ON DVDRW LH-18A1P which is an IDE drive. It sounds very similar to your situation Jerry.

Now I have to decide do I go the USB thumb route or get a SATA optical drive. They're pretty cheap now and my current one sounds like a jet engine when it's doing heavy data transfer.

Thanks for the link.

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Intel DG965WH, Dvico DVB-T Lite x2, HDHR, Gigabyte GT220, KingstonSSD, WD20EARS version=latest