problems perparing hd during install

[ihsanshade]

Hi, I'm trying to re-install Arch on a machine that has been running Arch for a months now. The reason I am re-installing is because I ran into some problems with xorg and gdm after lagged out update yesterday morning that I didn't know how to fix. I assumed re-installing would be as simple this time as it was the first couple of times, but I was completely wrong. Now, when I get to the prepare harddrive portion of the setup process (I've been using auto prepare), things go sour. When I run auto prepare, the little box pops up indicating that sda is being prepared, but somewhere during the process a little out put buffer appears in the bottom left hand of the screen showing "blk: botched request" or a bunch of data I can't make sense of. Following this, the buffer takes over the whole screen black and the data continues until it ends/hangs on either a kernel panic, something about end trace, or the blk: botched request.

I'm completely lost for ideas on things to do. None of it makes sense to me. When I installed Arch a few of months ago on the same machine, I went through a couple of installs before I got things configured the way I wanted. Now, I can't even get one install to stick.

Any helpful suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[reed9]

I would try and partition the drive first using a live cd like parted magic, and then manually select your mount points during the install.

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[Jonathan183]

The reason I am re-installing is because I ran into some problems with xorg and gdm after lagged out update yesterday morning that I didn't know how to fix. I assumed re-installing would be as simple this time as it was the first couple of times, but I was completely wrong. Now, when I get to the prepare harddrive portion of the setup process (I've been using auto prepare), things go sour.

I suggest next time you have a problem you do a downgrade of packages ... see here.

I would try and partition the drive first using a live cd like parted magic, and then manually select your mount points during the install.

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I agree setup of partitions the way you want is probably the best way to go anyway ... and PartedMagic will allow you to do this easily.

... are you using the CD you used for the original install? if not then give it a try - don't forget Arch is a rolling release update so although you may use a 2008 CD after you run pacman -Syu everything will be as up-to-date as if you started from a 2009 CD .