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Intermittant install failure on system with limited free I/O - grub-install tmes out #2132

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@JedMeister

I've hit an issue a couple of time now that if I install 2 v19 isos to vms at the same time on a (overloaded) proxmox host, grub-install will timeout on one of the installs (the timeout is 120s - so it's crazy it times out...). After a bit of diagnosis the issue I hit appeared to be caused by choked I/O and did not occur every time.

Out of interest it was the first VM I started (about ~5-10 sec before the other) that failed. The failure occurred while the 2nd VM was unpacking the squashfs.

As a secondary issue, the error message shown to the user only has an "OK" button - which appears to just make the system hang?! So a hard reset is required. After that I found a second try completed successfully. Please note that as the disk was partially set up - but without grub installed properly, proxmox tried to boot from the disk by default - so I had to explicitly set to VM to boot from ISO first (then change back to the root volume post install - the third ISO boot option will work around that).

Given that this issue is clearly an "edge case" issue which requires a system with extremely low drive I/O available (lots happening, super slow disk, etc) I'm not going to make this a priority.

IMO the full fix is changing the error message screen to provide 3 different options:

  1. Retry with extended timeout period.
  2. Reboot so the user can try again (with a note about need to explicitly boot from ISO again)
  3. Exit installer into live OS to troubleshoot - leave system exactly as it was at failure - e.g. root volume still mounted etc.

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    bugiso (build type)tkl-installerTurnKey custom ISO installer (replaces di-live): https://github.com/turnkeylinux/tkl-installer

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