I have two SSD laptops. On one of them, I easily installed CentOS. On the second one, it failed at examining storage--it would either freeze completely or crash with a kernel panic message.
On the second one, a generic Clevo, I decided to reinstall, and got the same issue--hanging or kernel panic on examining storage, though it had been trouble free the first time.
I've been googling this and came across nothing relevant--in one case, it was due to LVMs, in another, due to a previous installation, in others, possibly due to EFI, none of which were a factor for me.
On the Clevo, I decided to leave it as it is for now, as I'm using it, and the differences aren't major. On the other, an older Zenbook, the UX31E, I was able to get around it by installing CentOS 6.3 instead, which went in without incident. When it crashes, the machine freezes completely, so I'm not even able to view any logs, get to a terminal with ctl+alt+Fx.
At this point, I'm not asking for help, as much as I am wondering if anyone else has run into this. Another theory given to someone having similar problems was to check memory, which I haven't done, but apparently, only CentOS and SL 6.4 have this problem.
Also, as I can work around it, I am not going to spend a lot of time troubleshooting--but I'm wondering if anyone else has run into something similar. It's only been on these two laptops, and the only thing really in common is that they're SSD, but I have no idea if that's a factor--I don't have an extra SATA notebook drive to test if that's the issue or nto.
So, my only question here is, has anyone else run into this, and did you find a fix? Or suggestions in trouble shooting? (Though I probably won't go to the effort of running memtest overnight, as 6.4 seems to be the only thing affected. I tried with both netinstall and Install DVD on both SL and CentOS, same result, crash or hang at examining storage devices).
I have not tried totally cleaning the disk of either machine and seeing if that's an issue, but in both cases, there was both empty space and empty, standard ext4 partitions for them to use.
Thanks for taking the time to look at this. Though I'm not going to invest a great deal of effort in troubleshooting, I'm certainly ready to try simple solutions. On the Zenbook, I don't have anything very important.
On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 11:09:27AM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
Ok, to answer my own post.
In a nutshell,
Tried to install CentOS 6.4 on two different machines and it would fail at examining basic storage--usually crashing, sometimes just hanging. CentOS 6.3 didn't have the problem.
After a great deal of googling and thinking, I realized the difference between the time I'd successfully installed 6.4 on the laptop and failed to do so was changing the filesystem of a Fedora install that shared the test laptop.
If I use BTRFS on the Fedora system, the CentOS system won't install. If Fedora is using ext4, it installs as expected. Interesting that this is a regression on RH's part (I say RH because I had the same results with Scientific Linux, and regression because the issue doesn't occur in CentOS 6.3) The failure comes early, at examining basic storage.
So, I realize it's a fairly unusual case, but figured I'd put it here for posterity.
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 10:36:32AM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
If I use BTRFS on the Fedora system, the CentOS system won't install. If Fedora is using ext4, it installs as expected. Interesting that this is a regression on RH's part (I say RH because I had the same results with Scientific Linux, and regression because the issue doesn't occur in CentOS 6.3) The failure comes early, at examining basic storage.
I should add that if there is already a CentOS system on the machine, there are no problems with installing Fedora using BTRFS. Additionally, if one wants to reinstall CentOS after installing the Fedora system with BTRFS one can use 6.3.
On 06/22/2013 04:41 PM, Scott Robbins wrote:
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 10:36:32AM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
If I use BTRFS on the Fedora system, the CentOS system won't install. If Fedora is using ext4, it installs as expected. Interesting that this is a regression on RH's part (I say RH because I had the same results with Scientific Linux, and regression because the issue doesn't occur in CentOS 6.3) The failure comes early, at examining basic storage.
I should add that if there is already a CentOS system on the machine, there are no problems with installing Fedora using BTRFS. Additionally, if one wants to reinstall CentOS after installing the Fedora system with BTRFS one can use 6.3.
I think Btrfs was depreciated in favor of XFS for RHEL 7:
[W]e're looking to make XFS the new default for boot, for root and for user data predictions because it's a better match for our enterprise customers than btrfs seems to be.
Denise Dumas, director of software engineering at Red Hat Inc.
So maybe it started with 6.4 kernels, or maybe there was just a bug in initial kernel.
Also, there could be two causes:
1. You tried to use btrfs partitions with only formatting them.
2. You used GPT partition table that 6.4 can not see properly?
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 06:15:01PM +0200, Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
On 06/22/2013 04:41 PM, Scott Robbins wrote:
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 10:36:32AM -0400, Scott Robbins wrote:
If I use BTRFS on the Fedora system, the CentOS system won't install. If Fedora is using ext4, it installs as expected. Interesting that this is a regression on RH's part (I say RH because I had the same results with Scientific Linux, and regression because the issue doesn't occur in CentOS 6.3) The failure comes early, at examining basic storage.
So maybe it started with 6.4 kernels, or maybe there was just a bug in initial kernel.
Also, there could be two causes:
You tried to use btrfs partitions with only formatting them.
You used GPT partition table that 6.4 can not see properly?
It's an MSDOS partition table. Just to be sure I was clear--I did NOT try to install CentOS to BTRFS. If there is a Fedora partition, whether it be /dev/sda1 or a2 (the only ones I tried) and it is formatted in BTRFS, with Fedora installed and working, I cannot install CentOS using the 6.4 disk. Note that i only tried this with 64 bit, and I'm not overly concerned about it now that I know I can workaround it. Generally, I only install CentOS by itself, these two laptops were sort of a special case.
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Ljubomir Ljubojevic -
Scott Robbins