Re: F38 install issues
On Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:33:04 -0400
Matt Morgan <minxmertzmomo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi. I haven't been here for a long time, which I guess is a
testament
to how well Fedora works these days.
True.
I have a new laptop, set up with Windows, that I'm trying to
install
F38 on. I used the media writer to make a USB boot/install drive. It
booted fine, and I clicked to install to hard drive.
Is this a live image? I thought that when they were installed, they
just were copied directly onto the drive. I always use netinstall.
But, wouldn't you still have to tell it which partitions or space to
use, or does it automatically divine that the efi partition should be
/boot/efi?
I took about half of the 1TB SSD for Fedora, and told it to
continue.
Then I left for a few minutes. When I came back, the computer had
booted to the USB drive again (it appeared). I removed the USB drive
and rebooted again.
I think something critical happened in those few minutes. :-)
The system booted to Windows with no indication of a grub boot menu.
The drive was missing the space I'd reclaimed, so clearly that
worked, at least partly. But nothing I do seems to get it to boot
linux or drop me at a grub menu.
If it was installed while secure boot (UEFI) was active, it will only
boot in UEFI mode. If the system doesn't know where /boot/efi is, it
can't boot in UEFI mode.
When I boot off the usb drive, it works, but I don't see any
linux-related files on the SSD. So basically it looks like the drive
got partitioned, at least partly, and the install didn't run. So I'm
trying to run the install again, but no combination of clicks is
getting me what I want.
1) For "Installation Destination," I see "Error checking storage
configuration." I click on that, and it has the one device for me to
install to. At the bottom, it says "Error checking storage
configuration." When I "click for details," I get
---
The following erros were encountered when checking your storage
configuration. You can modify your storage layout or quit the
installer.
Failed to find a suitable stage 1 device: EFI System Partition must be
mounted on one of /boot/efi.; EFI System Partition cannot be of type
None.; EFI System Partition cannot be of type ntfs.; EFI System
Partition must be mounted on one of /boot/efi.; EFI System Partition
cannot be of type ext4.; EFI System Partition must e mounted on one
of /boot/efi.; EFI System Partition cannot be of type btrfs,; EFI
System Partition must e mounted on one of /boot/efi.
----
This is because it can't find /boot/efi to boot in UEFI mode.
If I then go into "BLIVET GUI PARTITIONING" I do see a
Btrfs volume,
labeled "fedora_locahost-live," of 460GB. It has "home" and
"root"
subvolumes. It has no mountpoints for / and /home, but I can add them.
Still, I guess it wants me to tell it where to put /boot? What do I
do?
For reference, when I look at the drive in BLIVET I see
device type format size label
mountpoint nvme0n1p1 partition efi 100MiB
nvme0n1p2 partition 16MiB
nvme0n1p3 partition ntfs 491.34GiB
nvme0n1p5 partition ext4 1024MiB fedora_localhost-live
nvme0n1p4 partition ntfs 662MiB
So the overall picture I'm getting is that the first install didn't
finish partitioning the drive (since I don't see anywhere for /boot)
and didn't do any of the install. But a) I'm not really confident in
that assessment b) I don't know what to do next, in any case. Is it
nvwe0n1p2 where /boot was meant to go?
I don't know windows, but I have heard that there is sometimes
a recovery partition that you wouldn't want to clobber, could that be
p4? Or maybe that is p2? If it is p4, maybe that is the reason that
it wasn't allocated as btrfs, and so the fs type was left as ntfs.
If p4 is actually the install space for / in Fedora, you could boot the
live image, and use gdisk (or fdisk) to remove the above partitions in
the space you want to use for Fedora. I think that would be p5 and p4
(if it isn't windows recovery). Then, try to install from the live image
again, but be sure to assign /boot/efi to the existing efi partition
for windows so both fedora and windows can boot from it.
An alternative if the above doesn't work. I haven't used the netinstall
for a while, and it isn't live, but it allows for custom partitioning,
which seems to be what you need. I think it is still hub and spoke;
there are discussions of some kind of html anaconda interface, but I
don't think it is default yet. If it is still hub and spoke, you would
select the custom partitioning spoke and tell it to use the existing
efi partition as /boot/efi, and then allocate the rest for /boot and /.
On the scheme above it looks like, as Samuel said, /boot would be
assigned to p5 and / would be assigned to p4, if it isn't the windows
recovery partition.
Then, because a netinstall is minimal (runlevel multiuser), you could
ask it to install the desktop that you actually want to use as part of
the install so it would boot to graphical. The first option will be
easier if it works.