Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:25:34 -0500 From: William Bulley <web@umich.edu> To: Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: where to ask about problems with bsdinstall in 9.0RC2? Message-ID: <20111119222534.GB13594@itcom245.staff.itd.umich.edu>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
According to Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com> on Sat, 11/19/11 at 10:08: > > IIRC, the error message was "out of inodes". > > This means something was trying to put *lots* (where 'lots' is relative > number, depending on the size of the filesystem :) of little files on the > filesystem. You were _not_ out of 'free space' on the filesystem, just out > of slots for file 'metadata'. Newfs, if not told specifically how many > inodes to allocate, makes a 'guess' based on the size of the slice -- thus > increasing the size of a partition will have an automatic 'side effect' of > increasing the total number of inodes. However, by explicitly stating the > number of inodes, or the inodes per unit of storage, when running newfs, > one can get more (or fewer) inodew _without_ having to change partition > sizes. Most significantly, one can do this -- change the number of inodes, > that is -- *without* having to destroy/recreate any other partitions on > the same physical device. > > SECONDLY, if this happened -during- the install, and the complaint > was about "/var" -- as distinct from something like '/a/var', or '/mnt/var' > Then the problem is *NOT* on the drives you are installing *ONTO*, but > on the media you are installing _from_. At a guess, the installer is > using /var -- probably /var/tmp -- to keep scratchpad files in, and there > are not enough inodes for the installer. could it be unpacking tarfiles > there, move/copy onto the 'target' media? > > You're installing from a memory stick right? You may need to rebuild > the filesystem on the stick, _manually_ specifying a larger number of > inodes for the filesystem that /var is part of. No that was not the error. The error was something along the lines of: "var/xxxx xxxx" but I don't recall the exact text of the error message - the main point of my previous messages was to point out the missing leading slash, not "/var", but just "var" - which at the time I thought was most unusual. This was happening during an "attempted" install of 9.0RC2 from DVD ISO as in: FreeBSD-9.0-RC2-i386-dvd1.iso and was not an attempt from a memory stick. Thanks for the reply, but based on another reply, I think my problem has stemmed from the use of bsdinstall which apparently doesn't do a very good job of installing a subsequent version of FreeBSD on top of an existing (prior) version of same. Had I been able to upgrade using the normal methods (buildworld and installworld) from 8.2-STABLE to 9.0RC1 or 9.0RC2 I would have, but during the kernel compile process I got a compile time error (that was trying to upgrade to RC1 just prior to the arrival of RC2) and there was no way I could deal with that. Interestingly enough, in looking around following that failed upgrade attempt, the RC1 ISOs and so forth were missing from ftp.freebsd.org which I thought was odd. Shortly thereafter RC2 was being seen around *.freebsd.org in various places, so I must have been making this attempt during the transition from RC1 to RC2 in all the distribution places. This convinced me to burn a new DVD (against the RC2 ISO) but then I got hammered by the not-ready-for-prime-time bsdintall program... :-( Thanks again. Regards, web... -- William Bulley Email: web@umich.edu 72 characters width template ----------------------------------------->|
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20111119222534.GB13594>