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PoofyGummy

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 11

[SOLVED] Install not working at several points

I tried to start up an old xp machine yesterday while my main one is being serviced, and I couldn't get anything to work, because everything was unbearably slow and no browsers were functioning. So I did what has once worked with an even older machine - I tried to install an ultralight linux distro.

The system is x86, so the installation from windows isn't available, so I made an install disk.

However in the middle of the actual core component installation the process randomly fails with the below error message.

Debootstrap warning
Warning: Failure trying to run: chroot "/target" dpkg --force-overwrite --force-confold --skip-same-version --install
/var/cache/archives/adduser_3.118_all.deb
/var/...

This of course fails the install.

This alone would be an issue, but fiddling around with restarting the computer and setting the amount of questions displayed and reformatting the install partition I eventually managed to get past the 48% mark. I still have no idea how. The install then failed at 75% with a message I can't recall, but another repartitioning fixed everything and the installation proceeded to picking the kernel. I picked the top one, 5.10 no pae, and proceeded right up to the configuring software packages step, where it failed again right at the start. I restarted and formatted and got to the same point. Then I figured I could install everything myself later, so I tried installing the bootloader, but that didn't work, and finishing the installation didn't work either, so I had to restart, whereupon the previous installation was ignored and installing onto the used partition failed, so I had to delete the partition again, and since then I'm once again unable to get past that message above.

Disk integrity is fine.
Iso is from the latest link to sourceforge.
Minimum requirements are exceeded about tenfold, except in RAM where it's only double the minimum at 256MB.
The hardware is exceedingly standard, except the keyboard layout.

What do I do? What could possibly be going wrong?

PS: If needed a LAN connection would be difficult but possible.
I can't delete the previous boot partition of XP, because i have no idea how to copy it in a way that i can put it back.

Last edited by PoofyGummy (2022-10-06 12:30)

PoofyGummy

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Install not working at several points

UPDATE: fiddling around and setting the boot flag on the XP partition again enabled me to go past the core installation process. However, "Select and install software" fails again like before.
Approximately at 10% just after "Configuring keyboard konfiguration (i386)", despite the keyboard config now being set to US english.
The grub boot loader installation also fails at that exact same step and the grub-pc package fails to install into /target/.

PoofyGummy

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Install not working at several points

UPDATE: after hours of retrying the install worked when the bootable flag was set on the XP partition, all languages set to american, the partition remade before restarting and then after restarting too, all the debconfig questions were set to be asked, all the installer elements were loaded, the 5.10 non pae kernel was chosen without full initrd. And a couple of memory clears were done between the steps.

However the system is unbearably slow much slower than winXP, with minutes passing between a button on the setup windows being pressed and a new one popping up. I wonder if this is because it said something about loading into a ramdisk at the start.

Either way the system is unusable in this state and I more than twice meet every minimum requirement. Please advise!

q4osteam

Q4OS Team

Registered: 2015-12-06

Posts: 4,230

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Install not working at several points

What OS do you use ? What installation media did you download for installation ?

PoofyGummy

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Install not working at several points

It's an x86 machine with a partition for win XP, and there's only one install disk version for 32 bit systems among the most current ones.

The installation seems to have worked, but i have no idea why the system is so unbelievably slow. 256MB ram should be more than enough to simply boot up the system and yet here i am sitting in front of a black screen for 10 minutes, waiting for the login screen to load.

Also adding a wireless network is impossible because after selecting the correct one from the list of networks it says  could not connect SSID not found.

PoofyGummy

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Install not working at several points

Judging by the sound the HDD is also trying to perform the same operation every second. This coincides with an error message appearing on the lower runlevel screens about an I/O error every second.

The network utility also states that some component might not be running or some permissions might not be available when it fails to save changes to a wireless network.

Windows also does not recognize the linux partitions and now displays the entire disk as a single partition, despite the windows partition remaining unchanged throughout. So now I have no idea when windows would start overwriting the q4os system by writing into what it thinks is its own partition.

The system only uses 128 of the 256MB of RAM, the processor is 2.4GHz, so more than fast enough to run even modern applications, there's 1GB of swap space, and 10GB of free disk space. I have no idea what sort of bottleneck could cause boot times of 15 minutes.

If I had to hazard a guess, based on the errors it would have to be some HDD partitioning error, but the ext4 / partition was set up by the installer and applied without any other changes, and there were no error messages about that.
The disk might have a reduced read write speed due to age, but not by this much.

Please help!

Last edited by PoofyGummy (2022-10-05 16:43)

PoofyGummy

Member

Registered: 2022-10-03

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Install not working at several points

Solved.

The issue was that the other HDD was dying.
On a different one the installation worked without issues, the system boots fast and runs silky smooth.