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partitioning errors inside VMs

Open Maxwelldoug opened this issue 1 year ago • 12 comments

Latest Installer as of July 5th 2024 results in frequent install failures. I have now verified this across multiple hypervisor platforms on multiple hosts including multiple host OSes.

these failures seem to run down to two errors with what is likely a shared cause.

Install on a blank disk starts as such image

but quickly devolves to one of the following errors depending how the machine is feeling (or other times works completely fine with seemingly no difference.) image image

While I wanted to create an issue for this, I cannot give much more detail as the logs are rather unhelpful and I know very little of what the script is doing. If there are any further debugging steps I can take, I am glad to help.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 Maxwelldoug

Forgot to mention, this is not a case of the hypervisor presenting an invalid disk as the same hypervisor with the same disk worked with no configuration changes or changes to the installer version at this time yesterday, and I am reinstalling due to an unrelated failure on my part.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 Maxwelldoug

Update to this, I found a distinction: disabling VM tools fixes seems to fix this, since issue creation I have done 4 attempts with VM tools enabled and 4 without, switching regularly. All attempts with VM tools failed, all attempts without it succeeded.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 Maxwelldoug

How are you enabling these tools? Is it a setting on your host or are you installing something in the live image?

taukakao avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 taukakao

How are you enabling these tools? Is it a setting on your host or are you installing something in the live image?

Immediately after the time zone Albius asks if I want VM tools and I click yes.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 Maxwelldoug

Then I'm pretty sure it's just been by pure chance. The VM Tools page just influences which image gets downloaded. Albius fails before it even reaches the download here.

taukakao avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 taukakao

It'd be a pretty big statistical anomaly as I'm now up to 6/6 and pattern maintains, but you'd know more than I do about the codebase, and if the choice only affects the image selected then I'm out of ideas.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 06 '24 02:07 Maxwelldoug

6/6 sounds incredibly unlikely But I just checked and I absolutely can't find anything else that changes with that. Maybe I'm missing something tho.

taukakao avatar Jul 06 '24 19:07 taukakao

This persists in installer 130

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 17 '24 17:07 Maxwelldoug

It happens to me too with or without selecting to install the VM tools, using VirtualBox

Akryum avatar Jul 30 '24 00:07 Akryum

That confirms this made it to stable. I've heard second hand a few accounts of it on real hardware, although much rarer. Possibly a good time to start investigating.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jul 30 '24 01:07 Maxwelldoug

I encountered this issue and reported it here: https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/vanilla-installer/issues/414

So I suspect that it is a timing issue, the partition gets created, but the partition device node doesn't exist yet. A blockdev --rereadpt /dev/$disk after the partitions are create might resolve this, it causes the kernel to reread the partition table. Otherwise adding a small sleep after it wasn't found immediately and retry would also do it.

PyroDevil avatar Aug 04 '24 08:08 PyroDevil

I have this issue occurring on real hardware. I have two laptops which I have been testing on and both have the same "No device found for /dev/sda4" error occur. Both laptops are older 8-12 years old (not sure if it matters).

This seems to reproduce every time I attempt to install on either of the laptops (currently on the 8-24-2024 build, but it happened on older builds as well). Let me know if there is any testing or extra steps to carry out.

paullenhardt avatar Sep 04 '24 02:09 paullenhardt

I too have encountered this error just now. Trying to install vanilla in an old hp 4740s laptop. Tried it two times. Well so much for linux for another year. It still is not there yet.

cetera00 avatar Jan 21 '25 20:01 cetera00

I too have encountered this error just now. Trying to install vanilla in an old hp 4740s laptop. Tried it two times. Well so much for linux for another year. It still is not there yet.

Don't write off Linux as a whole - this is thoroughly a vanillaOS issue. A really annoying one, though.

Maxwelldoug avatar Jan 21 '25 20:01 Maxwelldoug

@taukakao this is not resolved as of iso version 20250220

Image

Maxwelldoug avatar Mar 11 '25 23:03 Maxwelldoug

Yes, the latest iso doesn't have the newest Albius changes yet.

I will try to release a new version soon.

taukakao avatar Mar 11 '25 23:03 taukakao