I’ve been digging DEEP into my Bag of Tricks with mixed results. I was able to get KDE to actually boot by switching to lightdm, with one small little fly in the ointment: The font blew up to 1024 x 768 resolution and my BenQ monitor was not even recognized. Some of the other DE also worked but the same problem persisted. So I gave Rocky the old Heave Ho and wiped Rocky from the NVMe 4.0 using GParted so I had a CLEAN drive.
This time I decided to try a DIRECT Reinstall though it would take hours to reconfigure. But as was the case when I tried to install Rocky 8.4 it would get to a certain point and throw the following ERROR message: "The following ERROR occurred while installing. This is a FATAL ERROR and installation will be aborted. DNF error : Error unpacking rpm package [Fill in the name of some rpm package]. I had checked the media 3 times and it always was reported as GOOD. To PROVE that the media was GOOD I wiped out the 2 TB HDD and installed it on there. It installed just fine!! No error messages no nothing, just a clean install. Having proved that would work I returned once again to GParted and wiped out the drive and started over, only this time I created it to fit on the 1 TB Corsair Force MP600 which reports out as being exactly 931.51 GiB. I created my Classic Partitioning scheme to be 931 GiB in size and left the 0.51 as a “slop factor” . I got KDE installed, and Xfce installed, and confirmed that the HDD with Rocky installed on it would indeed boot. I re-booted the machine several times. No problems!! Now I dug into my Bag of Tricks and planned to move the entire install over to the NVMe drive:
I issued the following command:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/nvme0n1 status=progress
…only a few seconds later I received the following message " Out of space".
Back to GParted and wiped the NVMe drive clean again. This time I first BACKED UP Rocky Linux to a separate 1 TB drive and from there I tried to "RESTORE " Rocky Linux to the NVMe drive. A few seconds in I once again got the “Out of space” message.
This time before I wiped the NVMe drive clean I compared what was copied to the NVMe drive and compared it to the HDD drive. On the HDD I have the following:
Partition…File System… Mount Point … Label
/dev/sdb1…ext4…/boot
/dev/sdb2… ext4…/media/sdb2…/home
/dev/sdb3…ext4…/media/sdb3…/vm
[down arrow]
/dev/sdb4 [key]… extended…/media/sdb4
unallocated…unallocated
/dev/sdb5…ext4…/media/sdb5…/usr
/dev/sdb6…ext4…/media/sdb6…/backup
/dev/sdb7…ext4…/media/sdb7…/var
/dev/sdb8…ext4…/root
/dev/sdb9…ext4…/media/sdb9…/tmp
/dev/sdb10 [key]…linux swap…swap
unallocated…unallocated
On the NVMe drive I have /dev/sdb1 (/boot); /dev/sdb2 (/home); and /dev/sdb3 (/vm). BELOW THAT all that is listed is UNALLOCATED – No [Key]; No Extended Partitions; just “UNALLOCATED” space.
Just for FUN( and because I CAN, and just KNOW some would would ask) I decided to see what would happen if I did a total AUTOMATIC INSTALL and allowed the computer to do its own thing, hoping that it might point me in some direction. Nope, even with a totally AUTOMATIC INSTALL I still got the dreaded:
“The following ERROR occurred while installing. This is a FATAL ERROR and installation will be aborted. DNF error : Error unpacking rpm package [Fill in the name of some rpm package].”
My Bag of Tricks is now EMPTY. I feel a wee bit like Sisyphus: I solve one problem only to be slapped across the head by another. I can’t seem to win. I have ONE trick still left up my sleeve: Do a reinstall of CentOS 8.3, then HOPE when I Update and Roll over CentOS 8.3 => 8.5 it does not blow up (though I think I already tried this and it blew up).
There has got to be some way to move the entire sdb drive to the NVMe drive… or in the alternative do a direct install to the NVMe drive itself. Any help someone can provide would be greatly appreciated.
D’Cat