Feeling stupid

[Runaway1956]

The son really wanted to install Ubuntu to his laptop, but it has failed repeatedly. Seems to be related to the squashfs used on the CD/DVD, but we don't know that for sure.

As an alternative, I offered to download a BSD for him, and settled on PCBSD.

OK, downloaded, burnt the ISO on a Ubuntu machine, and the burning process completed successfully - or so Brasero reported. But, I was unable to mount or read the DVD. Figuring that something had gone wrong, I discarded the coaster.

Over the network, I had (another) son burn the image on Windows. Windows mounted the burnt DVD, so I used it to install to the laptop. Something isn't right, and BSD won't finish booting - but that's another issue. For learning purposes, I decided to install PCBSD to a VM on the Ubuntu machine, hoping to figure out what we did wrong on the laptop. (Another possibly related issue - when I mount the image instead of the disk, PCBSD reports that the disk drive doesn't respond to ATAPI commands, so installation in the VM fails.)

TALK ABOUT WEIRD!!! UBUNTU WILL NOT MOUNT THIS DVD EITHER!

I have this disk in the drive, which we used last night to install BSD, but Ubuntu won't read it. I might understand if Windows failed to mount a *nix image, but I'm using *nix, trying to read something that is presumably a *nix FS if it is not a standard DVD file system

Can anyone enlighten me as to what file system is used on PCBSD's installation disk, and what packages I may need to install on Ubuntu?

The exact title of the downloaded disk image is "PCBSD7.1-x86-DVD.iso"

Is it possible that despite having "installed" the operating system, the FS is corrupt, or something?


EDIT: quick update - having read part of knowledge database, I have disabled ACPI within the VM, and installation seems to be progressing normally. If this works, I may very well figure out the problem on the boy's laptop. So, one problem solved!

[Runaway1956]

Update. The VM failed to install, citing an error extracting files. A retry fails to even start the installer. Obviously, my downloaded image is corrupted in some manner. Odd, that BSD installed itself to the laptop without any errors, until reboot.

I have BSD 7.2 about 78% downloaded, should be finished when I get home from work. Will try again with that. I am using uTorrent to download the images, primarily because I can throttle the torrent to suit my needs. Perhaps I should have used wget or Firefox download manager. Oh well, live and learn......... uTorrent is doing a forced recheck on the downloaded image as well - if it repairs, I'll have two images to work from.

[BlackBox]

You couldn't get the Ubuntu live CD to load, or the installation failed?
FYI, it took me 4 attempts to burn an Ubuntu CD that would actually work; the fact that a burning program burns an image successfully, unfortunately, doesn't have to mean anything. The disk can still be broken: it either won't boot at all, or it'll hang during booting, or there may be an error during installation. It's best to a) check the MD5 of an iso right after downloading it, and b) do a disk check after burning the disk (it's one of the menu items in the boot menu).
And don't burn to a re-writable disk.
Then it should work (sorry if you've heard all this before).
If there are still problems, try the Ubuntu forums.
Unlike in your posts here, however, do provide some information about the hardware, please.

Regarding PC-BSD, you could also be suffering from the bad-disk issue. Just because Windows was able to read the disk doesn't mean it's not damaged somewhere. Try to burn a new disk, or, which is what I like to do, after having had no luck with the regular images, burn just a boot disk and install over the internet. That'll probably work best with a network cable though.
But you said you managed to install PC-BSD? At what point during the boot process does your installation hang itself up?

Which VM did you use? It seems like people are having problems with 7.1 and VMWare (I don't know why that is so). However, there is a VMWare Image available for download of version 7.0.2.
On the other hand, 7.1 - if you succeed at installing it - is much improved over 7.0.x.

[Runaway1956]

Blackbox - Ubuntu won't install, period. We burnt multiple CD's as well as a DVD for the purpose, not to mention we used the DVD used to install on another machine, with success. The kid went so far as to order a "restore" CD from Dell, and it failed. There is an issue with this particular model of Dell. It's an Inspiron 9300 - I'd have to ask the son for more details, but it's not real special. He upgraded the hard disk and the memory, but it's still basically a standard Inspiron. Still, installation fails at the formatting stage. He has discussed this with a few Debian and Ubuntu gurus, and they blame it on hardware.

Anyway - I've done a "Forced recheck" on PCBSD 7.1 and PCBSD Release 7.2, as well as PCBSD 7.1 for 64 bit. All three check out. I am installing, right this minute, to a VM using Sun VirtualBox on Ubuntu. The installer ran it's integrity check, and it's happy!! Next post from PCBSD, I hope. If all goes well, I'll burn the image tomorrow, and hand it to my son.

[Runaway1956]

Ohhhh - kay. PCBSD 7.1 started reporting errors about not finding packages during install, so I abandoned it. PCBSD 7.2 installed. The X-server won't start, I'm stuck at the konsole when I log in. I've configured my ethernet adapter wrong, as I can't ping anything...... no browser .... nada.

I'll dig into configurations tomorrow, I'm beat right now. Messing around with configurations would be disastrous right now.

But, I'm kinda happy. The VM is installed, and running.....

PCBSD# uname -a
FreeBSD PCBSD 7.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE #0: Fri May 1 08:49:13 UTC 2009


The time and date are wrong - maybe I need to check my system clock - odd........