Debian 8.7.1 installer appears to halt during partitioning

[gengiskanhg]

I am installing Debian 8.7.1 in a DELL Precision T7500 Workstation. I encountered hard problems at the level of trying to burn an Ubuntu installation CD. Nevertheless, I do not like the Ubuntu advertisements and prefer much Debian.

Firstly I faced this problem: "Installer does not see hard drives"

After that I face the problem that the installer when partitioning was executed halts on approx. 33%. I wait up to 10 hours and made several tries with the same result. Then I used ALT+CTRL+F1 to show the log messages (in your case try all the F´s keys) and use an other terminal to realize with "> ps" that the process "partman" has an "S" status. This means it is almost stopped (I think).

SOLUTION: Using a freeware in MS Windows I delete the partitions and made a wide of data of the target drive (for Debian). Really I stopped that operation at about 25%. It takes too much time. I retried and the result was that the problem gone I think the disk has some data at its begining troubleshooting the partman used by Debian to partitioning the HD.

RECOMENDATION to DEVELOPERS of INSTALLER: Please solve this problem because it is very frustrating for those people that wish to use Debian...

[Head_on_a_Stick]

RECOMENDATION to DEVELOPERS of INSTALLER: Please solve this problem because it is very frustrating for those people that wish to use Debian...

There are no developers who frequent these boards regularly (AFAIK), this is the Debian User Forums rather than the Debian Developer Forums

Please read this link:

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debi ... #s-buglogs

It could be that the jessie installer lacks support for your (presumably brand new) hardware, have you tried the stretch installer?

https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-ins ... 7/20170115

It has just made RC1 status — happy testing!

[bentHnau]

My Jessie 8.7.1 installation seems stuck at partitioning as well. I've been seeing

Code: Select all

Creating ext4 file system for / in partition # 1 of SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sdb)...

for two or three hours now. How much longer should I wait? The drive is 500 GB.

[eor2004]

My Jessie 8.7.1 installation seems stuck at partitioning as well. I've been seeing

Code: Select all

Creating ext4 file system for / in partition # 1 of SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sdb)...

for two or three hours now. How much longer should I wait? The drive is 500 GB.

For a 500gb Hdd It should take only a couple of minutes, not hours!

It is not the first time I have read this type of post or complaint in the forums, so by personal experience I think that the debian partitioner does have some problems or issues partitioning some types of hard drives, it has happened to me a lot of times, for example: I've tried to install debian in a 1tb and a 2tb WD RE4 Enterprise Sata Hdd's and it stops when it's about to start making the partitions in the hdd, but never gave me problems installing to a 160gb, 500gb and a 640gb WD Caviar Blue Hdd's. I'm using right now an 1tb WD Caviar Black, the first time I tried installing debian on the 1tb WD Caviar Black it failed making the partitions, but the second time it worked, OTOH, Never had a problem installing openSUSE on any of the RE4 Enterprise HDD's, so it must be some issues with the debian installer and/or partitioner.

[hackspirit]

My Jessie 8.7.1 installation seems stuck at partitioning as well. I've been seeing

Code: Select all

Creating ext4 file system for / in partition # 1 of SCSI2 (0,0,0) (sdb)...

for two or three hours now. How much longer should I wait? The drive is 500 GB.

Sigh, I just registered here to get solution for this problem. I have been asking this in IRC like for 2 days and got no solution.
I am still stuck. Could you please share detail steps. I have tried other Distros on USB using Universal USB Installer, the debian is just not working.
Pl. help.

Also, there are NO videos on youtube, no nothing specific to installation on USB.
https://debian-handbook.info/browse/sta ... steps.html
This also does not helps much.

[bentHnau]

Could you please share detail steps.

I gave up and installed from a Debian live usb. I can't remember whether I installed right away or had to start a live user session and install from there.

[phenest]

The spec sheet for this workstation reports a "Integrated LSI 1068e SAS/SATA 3.0GB/s controller supports host-based RAID 0 or 1. Optional PERC 6/i PCIe SAS/SATA/SSD hardware RAID card
supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10".

A bit of research suggests the megaraid_sas driver is required for it to work correctly.