Installation steps

Installation is nothing more than restoring the disk image prepared for partclone utility. The image file is called "the payload" throughout the documentation.

Boot the installer

Booting from CD

Pop in the triage CD. Version 0.60 and later would work. Current version is 0.61.

Booting from PXE

If you can use network boot, things go faster. You often need to activate the PXE boot in the BIOS menu. See "Enabling PXE in BIOS".

Booting from USB stick

Plug the USB stick. Boot from it.

Start the installer

Choose the installation image

Regardless of booting method, the payload is coming from elsewhere. If you are using network, it's from the installation server to serve the payload. This is the primary method. You can use the USB storage, such as USB stick or USB disk for the payload. The installer knows the USB disks and tries to mount the USB disk and finds the payload. This is convenient when you don't have the installation server.

Finishing the installation

When it's done, it tries to reboot. Unfortunately, at the very end of reboot, it stops waiting for the return key. (Future enhancement to not wait.)

Troubleshoot

There are many reasons that the installation fails. Here are the common ones and what you should do.

Shows backtrace with "ata" in it

The disk controller lost the communication with the disk. It's either the disk is tanking, or dead. Send out the machine for repair

Shows backtrace with no apparent reason

You need to remember that the machines are old. Especially Pentium 4 era machines tend to have bad capacitors that renders the motherboard unstable at best, or it just dies with popped caps. Sometimes, you can visually see the popped caps, but if you suspect the machine is unstable, send it out as "Salvage". Nothing you can do to repair for this kind of failure. It could be the memory, but so far, it's rare to see the memory failure.

Disconnect while payload is loaded

Sometimes, network connection dies and the installation fails. You should have some idea what went wrong. If you stepped on a ethernet cable, that might be it. Some ethernet NIC has a bad connector. If that's the case, you need to install a new (well some other old) card instead.

The payload was loding but stopped with a lot of error message

Look closely the error message. If it says something like "sector 12345", it's probably a bad disk. Send it out to repair for new disk.

How to restart the installer

Once the installer fails, it asks you 0:reboot, 1:poweroff, 2:shell, something like that. Pick shell and do sudo /wce.py It starts the installer again.