General issue with Trisquel 5.5 installer and PATA HDDs ?

2 replies [Last post]
Darksoul71
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Joined: 01/04/2012

Hi all,

two days ago I wanted to set up another Trisquel Box using the standard 32 Bit ISO and the installer provided in Live mode.
The system is/was nothing special:
- Intel Pentium D 2x2.8 GHz
- 1 GB RAM
- PATA 160GB HDD (Samsung)
- PATA DVDROM
- GeForce 8600GT

I had the system set up previously with Manjaro Linux for testing. So the HDD was already partitioned. When I started the installation of Trisquel everything went fine until I reached the part where you can partition your HDD / choose where the bootloader gets installed.
/dev/sda was shown for the boot manager but the partition layout was greyed out. I partitioned the HDD with a single primary partition via fdisk, tryed again but still could not choose the partition layout. After formating the new generated partition with ext3 the installer then "magically" continued and I could choose to remove the "existing Linux system".

IIRC I had the same issue when setting up the Trisquel box for my little one. It also has an old 100 GB PATA HDD as system drive.

Unfortunately I could not find any error messages of the installer under /var/log. The output of dmesg looked also fine.

Does the Trisquel installer have issues with PATA drives ? I remember that installing Trisquel x64 to my 16GB USB stick worked like a charm and I could choose the partitioning of my "HDD" back then.

Regards,
Holger

aliasbody
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Joined: 09/14/2012

Maybe a problem with the Partition Table. I am not aware of any problem with PATA drives (even knowing that I don't own one myself).

Have you tried with Ubuntu for instance to see if it let you do what you want to do ? If you could test, then please report back if it works so we can look for a solution.

Darksoul71
Offline
Joined: 01/04/2012

Look, if I remember correctly both machines I set up showed similar behaviour:
Both have PATA drives, had already Linux installed and a pre-partitioned drive.

Generating one preformated ext3 partition on the HDD "solved" the issue.

Unfortunately I do not feel like re-installing the last box, since I already have installed a lot of stuff and taylored it to my needs.

If one highlights where the log of the Ubuntu / Trisquel installer is stored (/var/log I guess). I will try to find it.