Installation problems: filesystem is (not) full

[Raphaël Marmier]

Le dimanche, 25 mai 2003, à 11:04 Europe/Zurich, Tom Verbreyt a écrit :

>
> write failure on transfer (wrote -1 bytes of 240640 bytes)
> unable to transfer the base distribution from acd0
> / : write failed, filesystem is full
>
> and on VT4:
>
> pid 131 (cpio), uid 0 inumber 171 on /: filesystem is full
>

You are not alone. It happened to me a number of time with 4.8. I was 
trying to install FreeBSD on a laptop on the first partition while 
keeping the extended partition (where an image of windows was stored 
for future restauration). I tried every possible scenarion I could 
think of, to no avail.

I tried to investigate a bit. It looks like the installation program 
was trying to install files to the actual root fs, rather than on the 
new filesystems mounted under /mnt. Of course, that root mfs fills up 
in a second...

The fix for me was to take write down the partition table on a scrap of 
paper, suppress all but the intended partition (slice), set its type to 
FreeBSD, install (this time it works), then restore the other 
partitions (slices) in the table.

Don't forget to backup your data before doing that!

slightly off-topic, I've had other installation problems when other 
partitions (slices) are already present on a system: the disklabel 
utility refuses quite often to create volumes, either in automatic or 
manual mode. Deleting the whole partition (slices) table always solved 
the problem.

Raphael Marmier