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unr-meta package

Unable to install UNR on Acer Aspire One

Asked by paulb104

I have an Acer Aspire One with an 8GB SSD and 512MB ram. It came with Windows XP - that's gone now. I downloaded UNR 9.10 and used UNetbootin to put it on a 1GB flash drive. I've booted the Acer with that 1GB and everything seems to run really well.

I've tried to install UNR onto the Acer at least two dozen times, if not actually more than forty, trying different methods and taking notes along the way.

First I boot off of the usb drive and go to GParted and manually delete the large unknown partition, usually about 7.1gb. Originally there was one extended partition with one linux-swap file. As the retry's continued, a second linux-swap file appeared, and then a third. Now the free space is only 6.43GB.

Once GParted is finished and closed I start Install USR 9.10. One by one I pass the Welcome, Where Are You?, and Keyboard Layout steps. After clicking Forward on the Keyboard Layout page, the "Starting up the partitioner" popup appears and almost immediately goes to 47% and sits there for about thirty seconds then it jumps to 70% (Detecting file systems...) for another ninety seconds or so. The window vanishes and the cursor just spins for another two minutes in front of the greyed out Keyboard Layout screen.

The screen changed to step 4, Prepare disk space. "Erase and use the entire disk" is preselected so I have tried that repeatedly. Then it occurred to me that if there are extended partitions then the install program cannot actually have all 8.1GB so this selection doesn't make sense to me. I choose "Use the largest contiguous free space" and click forward. A few seconds later I'm at the Who are you? step, fill everything out and am finally taken to the Ready to Install screen where I then click the install button.

The window "Starting up the partitioner" appears and almost immediately goes to 15%, and then goes to 5%, for about a eighty seconds. Under the progress bar it reads "creating ext4 filing system for / in partition #1 of SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sda)..." After about two and a half minutes a window appears:
    Do you want to resume partitioning?
    The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in SCSI2 (0,0,0), partition #1 (sda) at / failed.
    You may resume partitioning from the partitioning menu.
    buttons: go back and continue

If I click continue, I am returned to step 6, Prepare disk space and "Starting up the partitioner" opens and almost immediately jumps to 47% and sits there for about thirty seconds then it jumps to 70% (Detecting file systems...) and just sits there. Then I notice the red crash icon, and the error is
   Sorry, the program "devkit-disks-daemon" closed unexpectedly

After I close on that, I get the error
   Sorry the program "parted_server" closed unexpectedly

It is usually at this point, after waiting a half hour or more and the progress bar still at 70%, I shut the Acer down and start over.

In the Prepare disk space step I have tried some options with "Specify partitions manually" but honestly I don't know enough with the system because I keep getting an error message about not having a root partition.

Can anyone advise me with getting UNR installed onto my netbook?

Thanks!!!!!

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#1

Seems this bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/devicekit-disks/+bug/452208

Hth

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paulb104 (paulb104) said : 		#2

Ok, so if that bug is indeed my problem, what can be done about it? I don't want to boot off of the usb drive permanently.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

Did you MD5 test the image you downloaded?
DId you run the verifier once initially booted to?
Have you tried some boot options?
Have you got the latest BIOS in the netbook (This is a well documented fix in acer aspire ones)?

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paulb104 (paulb104) said : 		#4

To actionparsnip:
    Did you MD5 test the image you downloaded?
    DId you run the verifier once initially booted to?
    Have you tried some boot options?
I do not understand these questions.

As for "Have you got the latest BIOS in the netbook (This is a well documented fix in acer aspire ones)?" I do not know how to do this as Windows is no longer on the device. The Acer has no operating system at the moment.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#5

Ok lets put this into perspective. You have downloaded a fairly massive and very sensitive piece of data over a publily accessible network (the internet) data corruption and can happen in transit. TCP does a very good job of catching erroneous packets of data using CRC and checksumming but some do get through as its not infallable.

You have downloaded the data, not checked it and transferred it onto the USB / SD card. Any errors will affect the install massively. You should check the img or iso you downloaded using md5 sums

Here are the hashes:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuHashes

Here is the method (their is a method for windows too)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM

Boot options modify how the kernel is used and loaded, some devices require you to disable ACPI and APIC and other such things to get a bootup, you should try a feew.

I have seen lots of users report their BIOS needed upgrading. This is OS independant as it is done from a USB stick. If you look on the bottom of the device you will see which model of the Acer Aspire One you have(their are many) and get the latest BIOS for it, transfer to a USB stick / SD card etc and upgrade. You may have more luck then.

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paulb104 (paulb104) said : 		#6

Well that was much more helpful! I've been working on pc's since 1993 and have used a variety of OS's (even os2) but I'm new to linux...

The MD5 sum checked out ok. I successfully flashed the bios using UNetbootin (with FreeDOS).

At Installing system | Partitions Formatting | "creating ext4 filing system for / in partition #1 of SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sda)..." It still sits for about two and a half minutes and I still get the error:
    Do you want to resume partitioning?
    The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in SCSI2 (0,0,0), partition #1 (sda) at / failed.
    You may resume partitioning from the partitioning menu.
    buttons: go back and continue

As for the boot options, I'd love to fiddle with them but I haven't a clue how.

Could installing another distro help me here? Might there be another distro that I could install just for the sake of trying it?

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paulb104 (paulb104) said : 		#7

I put Mandriva live KDE4 on a usb drive with UNetbootin. The acer booted to Mandriva but stopped at the blue splash screen with the spinning circle. Thinking that it may be working on something in the background I left it at the blue page for over ninety minutes, more than one, before I powered the acer down.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#8

Have you ran a test of the memory to make sure its healthy. I also suggest you boot to the live cd, unmount the internal drives partition and run:

sudo fsck /dev/sda

or whatver the drive is, you may also want to fsck /dev/sda1 (if fsck cannot check disks)

You may need boot options to make the installation go smoother.

Revision history for this message
psychologist (psychologist) said : 		#9

Oh wow! I tried to understand all this. Would someone enlighten me please? But don't use all the Linux command line language...I've not got a clue. I need point and click...Yep.......I'm Windows spoiled and Linux naive and the brain goes into "gaaaaaaaaaaaagh!" mode when I see all the shrt txt backslashes/forward slashes and grb, tar etc expressions.

 I've got what is a simple question similar to the one that started this thread. I bought an Acer Aspire One D255E netbook at the end of June (last Thursday) so the model is current. Tried to find Ubuntu for netbooks compatible with this model...looks like version 9 (?) is it. Tried to download and use the Windows installer and it fell over big time because it downloaded ver 11 for PC instead of the netbook....How'd that happen?. Also the grubinst package is so confusing.

Really simple request. Please tell me where to get a suitable Ubuntu program and how to install it on a USB so that I can boot from it. I've got Android on the netbook as an alternate boot and it's totally useless so I'd like to finally install Ubuntu to that partition when I'm sure it's going to work from the USB.

Many thanks for your help.

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