debian-9.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso results in "unknown or corrupt filesystem"

[Dennis Clarke]

Dear ppc types :

I have downloaded and booted and installed from the ports area the
following :

see https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/ports/

also debian-9.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso


I went for the "easy" install and simply allow the installer to put
everything onto the whole disk in a single partition. Nothing fancy. I
was also happy to see that it was possible to select packages from the
ports pkg area :

host : ftp.ports.debian.org

subdir : /debian-ports/

Someon on irc suggested that I stay away from the expert install and
just select the obvious simple options. That seems to work out.
Everything went along fine until reboot wherein I see a unknown or
corrupt filesystem message :

Loading Image...

This is followed by all the fans spinning up. Nothing else. This is
a PowerMac G5 with 8G of memory and nothing fancy.

Again someone on irc says "that's because you are using Yaboot" which
means the old magic won't work and I need new magic. So a manual setup
of the partitions. So I "need a separate /boot partition" which will
most likely be ext2 or perhaps ext4. However I think, not sure, there
is more to this. There needs to be a disk label ( partitions or slices )
and then one of them must have yaboot which most likely goes looking
for another one which will be "/boot" an ext4 filesystem and then yet
more for the usual filesystems.

So I will try to document this as I flail blindly forwards.

Dennis

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Post by Dennis Clarke
Again someone on irc says "that's because you are using Yaboot" which
means the old magic won't work and I need new magic.

Yes, it's this bug [1].

As I said in the channel, Yaboot is just old and unmaintained and
causes these issues if you try to use it with a modern ext4.

If you format the partition with ext2 or ext3, it will work.

It's a known issue which I haven't fixed *yet*, there is only so much
I can fix within a given amount of time. Please do not expert everything
to be perfect and fool-proof right from the start. If in doubt, ask
but please be patient.

Thanks,

Adrian

Post by Dennis Clarke
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825110

[Rick Thomas]

Try installing with “use entire disk and set up LVM” (or words to that effect) at partitioning time.

That will cause it to set up a small ext2 partition for /boot, which will make yaboot happy, and put the rest of your system under control of the Logical Volume Manager, which doesn’t hurt anything and gives you greater flexibility if you decide to add a disk or otherwise reconfigure your storage system once it’s been up-and-running for a while.

Rick

[Dennis Clarke]

Post by Rick Thomas
Try installing with “use entire disk and set up LVM” (or words to that effect) at partitioning time.

I have been going in circles on it, off and on, for over a week. It is
a very frustrating install process wherein magic and strange things
happen in various ways. If you choose the expert installer then you get
a hard coded dist of "buster" and the whole process fails. There is no
way to get around that. One must abort the install and start over.

If one chooses the basic installer then you need to pull the network
cable from the machine or you get force fed a DHCP config. There is no
way to choose manual network config. So the DHCP times out and then one
may do manual network config and put the cable back in. Silly but it
works.

For a sanity check I downloaded the jessie "oldstable" 8.8 full DVD for
powerpc and did a nice neat install. No problems. All went well. I took
a look at the partition table on /dev/sda afterwards :

nix# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 440G 1.3G 417G 1% /
udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev
tmpfs 1.6G 15M 1.6G 1% /run
tmpfs 4.0G 0 4.0G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 4.0G 0 4.0G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sdb1 2.7T 781G 1.8T 30% /mnt/backup


I had an external backup disk at the time and that explains sdb.

nix# parted /dev/sda
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Model: ATA Hitachi HDS72505 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: mac
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 512B 32.8kB 32.3kB Apple
2 32.8kB 1033kB 1000kB hfs untitled boot
3 1033kB 480GB 480GB ext4 untitled
4 480GB 500GB 20.3GB linux-swap(v1) swap swap

(parted) quit
nix#

Looks sane more or less with that oddball Apple thing and the weird
hfs filesystem for boot. However this is ye old yaboot way and with the
new grub2 we can expect that we won't need such things.

Post by Rick Thomas
That will cause it to set up a small ext2 partition for /boot, which
will make yaboot happy, and put the rest of your system under control
of the Logical Volume Manager, which doesn’t hurt anything and gives
you greater flexibility if you decide to add a disk or otherwise
reconfigure your storage system once it’s been up-and-running for a
while.
Rick

my thoughts : "you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"

I have tried over and over and over and over with variations of the
partitions wherein I had a small /boot which was ext2 as well as the
mystery Apple slice and without it. With LVM and saw errors that the
disk partition was broken in some mystical way. I have seen the
whole install complete and then not able to boot :

Loading Image...

I have seen endless errors :

Loading Image...

The same machine runs jessie just fine. I just did the install. Only
minutes ago. I am now back to the most recent netinst for sid and I
am again looking at the "partition disks" menu. I can select to create
a new mac partition and then guided mode with one large filesystem.
Then delete the large filesystem that results from that and create a
small 1G /boot ext2 and then create a LVM vol with the rest. That seems
to be acceptable until one tries the next step and I get an error that
partitions overlap.

What I have not seen, is anyone post an actual image of an actual
working install partition. As they say in Missouri : ".. you have got
to show me." I believe it works and I have heard as much. I simply
have not seen it.

So here I am giving this a try again with the network cable unplugged
and manual network config and again fussing with the manual disk
partition phase.


Dennis