Porteus installation fails with error code '4' on an EeePC.

[user1138]

Steps I followed during installation:
1.) Burned Porteus v2.0 64bit to a CD (No errors here, and the desktop booted fine from this disk, note the EeePC has no CD or DVD drive internal/external or otherwise).
2.) Rebooted the desktop into Porteus (Looks great here)
3.) Mounted a USB stick.
4.) Used the system menu (KDE) to copy (not install) Porteus to the USB stick. (I did this because the stick has a Multisystem base for booting my favorite short list of OS's, noting that Porteus 2.0 won't play nice with Multisystem hence this convoluted method to try and get it running).
5.) After the copying was complete, I unmounted the USB stick and booted up my ASUS EeePC netbook using the ESC key to boot the multisystem USB stick into puppyslax (all good so far).
6.) Currently I had Bodhi Linux on the Netbook which doesn't have enough packages available yet, so I unmounted it, started up gparted, formated the drive containing Bodhi to ext4, and flagged it as bootable then shut down Gparted.
7.) I opened a terminal and navigated to the freshly formated drive that had previously had Bodhi on it, in this case it was /dev/sda6 now mounted on /mnt/sda6.
8.) I ran the following command from the USB Stick in the current working directory /mnt/sda6:
/initrd/mnt/dev_save/boot/Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com
9.) The above command opened a message saying:

"Installing Porteus to /dev/sda6
Make sure this is the right partition before proceeding.
Press Enter to continue or Ctrl+c to exit."

10.) I pressed enter as this was the correct drive to install to which lead to the following error message:

"Flushing filesystem buffers...
Using extlinux bootloader.
Installation failed with error code '4'.
Please ask for help on the Porteus forum: http://www.porteus.org/forum
and provide the following information: the error code recieved,
the filesystem type and your partition layout for this device."

12.) As you can see it failed with error code '4', and here is the partition layout for the device I'm trying to isntall this on which is an "ASUS EeePC 1005PR" netbook:

Code: Select all

Partition           File System    Mount Point    Size        Used        Unused     Flags
/dev/sda1           ntfs           /mnt/sda1      100.00GB    24.40GB     75.60GB    
/dev/sda2           fat32          /mnt/sda2       10.00GB     8.44GB      1.56GB    hidden
/dev/sda3           extended                      122.88GB       ---        ---
    /dev/sda6       ext4           /mnt/sda6      120.98GB     2.08GB    118.89GB    boot
    /dev/sda5       linux-swap                                 1.91GB

Question:
What does code '4' mean, and how can I get Porteus to install on this netbook?

[Ed_P]

I suspect you will find it's because your sda6 partition is not a primary partition.

[user1138]

EdP

Please note that the same partition that you are referring to had Bodhi Linux installed on it, and the computer was booting from that partition, and before that it had other distro's installed and was booting up just fine from that same /dev/sda6 partition with those installed as well.

I suspect by my response that I'm not paying attention closely enough to what your trying to tell me so I'm going to stop and take another look at gparted but also keep in mind that it gave the same error before I formated that partition when linux was still installed on it which means it was complaining about that partition with whatever the error code '4' means even when it was still able to boot to that partition.

My point being that Ubuntu and other Linux distro's seem to be able to install and run on that partition just fine, and so I'm not sure why Porteus is having such a hard time with it.
Also if its such a simple problem then why is the Porteus installer requesting that a post is made here on the forum about it instead of just fixing it so that it can finish installing itself?

Thanks for the heads up though. I'll check out the primary partition issue to see if that makes any sense.

[user1138]

Ok, now my partition table looks like this:

Code: Select all

Partition           File System    Mount Point    Size        Used        Unused     Flags
/dev/sda1           ntfs           /mnt/sda1      100.00GB    24.40GB     75.60GB   
/dev/sda2           fat32          /mnt/sda2       10.00GB     8.44GB      1.56GB    hidden
/dev/sda3           primary        /mnt/sda3      120.88GB     2.08GB    118.80GB    boot
/dev/sda4           linux/swap                      2.00GB       ----        ----

...and when installing Porteus as meantioned in my orinigal post the same exact error message occurs.

Questions:
Any idea's what to do now? Is there something else I can try before ditching Porteus in favor of something that actually works?

[fanthom]

hi user1138,

the problem was that you ran the installer while being in different directory than installer itself so it could not find required files (syslinux files, vmlinuz, initrd, etc)
this problem has been addressed now (you can run installer from any dir you want) so please grab updated installer from here:
http://ponce.cc/porteus/x86_64/testing/ ... -Linux.com

be aware that it will wipe any bootloader which is installer to MBR (it wont touch bootloaders which are installed to a partition).

if you get a failure then please post error log generated by the installer.

[user1138]

fanthom
"...it wont touch bootloaders which are installed to a partition"

I think that is what I need it to do because I'm trying to install it to my /mnt/sda3 partition. In other words I'm trying to get Porteus to be the OS that boots up natively from the hard drive when the computer starts. I should probably re-read the FAQ to see if Porteus is not meant to be run from the hard drive but instead is meant to run like puppy linux from a USB.

I'll take some precautions so that the new installer doesn't destroy my multiboot USB key's MBR. I'll re-read the FAQ and try out the new installer.

Can't mark as solved yet since I have to test out the above to see if it works.
Thanks for the help.

[user1138]

fanthom,

Ok I tried the new bootloader, and it still exits with the same error code as described in my original post.

At this time I am deciding to give up on Porteus because I just don't have time to help bug test the problems with getting the installation process to work. I might come back and check it out again in 3 months when summer break starts.

Thanks for trying. Good luck with developing Porteus.

Note: This problem isn't solved and there is no room in the subject line to add the text [Solved] so... maybe someone else with an EeePC would be willing to take this on and continue testing it but then they wouldn't be able to change the subject line to solved if a solution was ever found so.... kind of a problem there.