On Sep 2, 2016, at 6:30 PM, Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com> wrote:
I did the experiment — manual partitioning did not help. But I sorta fumbled it in an interesting way that sheds some light on the question I asked in the quoted section above. Here’s what I did: 1) Retrieved the installer and put it on a uSD card as described in 2) Halted the CuBox-i4 and removed all external peripherals from it (including the uSD it boots from) and inserted the installer uSD. 3) Connected to the serial console and re-applied power. 4) Answered questions until it got to partitioning. 5) Chose “manual” partitioning. Since there was no other storage peripherals it only offered me the uSD, which (as a result of 1, above) had a large free space. I told it to use the free space for / and format that as ext2. I failed to delete the installer partition. (This is the sorta-fumble I mentioned earlier.) 6) I did not create a /boot or swap partition. I have attached a screen shot of the screen at the end of the process… After proceeding and answering questions, I ended up with an uSD card with two partitions. The second partition contains the installed system; the first partition still contains the installer. When it got to the end of the installation, it tried to reboot — presumably into the newly installed system in partition 2, but did not succeed in rebooting. It’s last words were: Sent SIGKILL to all processes Then nothing. This is what we were expecting. The interesting part comes next. I pulled the power plug and re-plugged. It ran u-boot and booted — but not into the installed system. Rather it booted into the installer — which, remember, was still present in partition 1. From this I conclude that the u-boot environment is not getting updated by the installer. And u-boot itself in not getting clobbered by anything in the installation process. Bottom line — the problem is verifiably in the late stages of the installer when it’s trying to make the system bootable. It’s not a problem with the auto-partitioning, and it’s not a problem with u-boot. Hope it helps! Rick |