where to ask about problems with bsdinstall in 9.0RC2?

[Matthew Seaman]

On 19/11/2011 00:53, Edward Martinez wrote:
> As the progress bar moved to the right toward 100% completion, a
> window popped up telling me that it (bsdinstall) could not handle
> the base.txz (BTW, what does the suffix ".txz" mean?) - it could
> not uncompress it and said something about "unable to write" and
> the string was something like: "var/base.txz" (note the lack of
> a leading slash in front of "var").

xz(1) is the latest compression program around.  It usually gets better
results than bzip2 so lots of usages are being switched to it. .txz is
a tar archive compressed with xz.

Hmmm.. I wonder if the base.txz file on your install media has become
corrupt?  If you've got a FreeBSD machine around (any supported 7.x or
8.x would do), you could just mount your 9.0 disk on it, find that file
wherever it is in the disk, and see if 'tar -tvf base.txz' will show you
the contents without errors.

The other possibility is that you ran out of space in the partition you
were trying to write to.  You'ld have to open an emergency holographic
shell to investigate (does the new installer even have that wording?  It
should...)  One thing to check is not only space usage but inode usage
too.  There's an ongoing discussion about installing onto small drives
and whether the bytes-to-inode ratio should be modified there.

The lack of a leading '/' on the path you saw is normal -- your hard
drive is mounted at something like /mnt while the system is installed
onto it.  The installer is just using paths relative to that mountpoint.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
JID: matthew at infracaninophile.co.uk               Kent, CT11 9PW

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