Hi, Larry, sorry to hear about your trouble. I wonder why you talk
about "reinstalling SL6", when you could have popped the SL6 SSD out,
put a blank one in, try el7/el8/whatever, if it bombs, put your SL6 SSD
back in. Cost of SSD is zero compared with the time saved.

On the other hand, I wonder if you see a hardware fault. Over the years
I came to rely on the SL/CentOS installer as a hardware test tool -
if I have seen so many cases where we have an iffy machine,
memtest runs just fine, but the OS installer fails with strange
symptoms (freeze, nonsense package errors, etc) - replace the RAM,
and now installer works, machine runs fine - conclusion - machine
was problematic because of bad ram (bad cpu fan, bad power supply, etc).

It is not impossible that originally you installed SL6 and all was fine,
then a hardware fault developed, and now the el7/el8 installer bombs.

But you do not tell us if you tried several different machines and what
the actual failure was (freeze, kernel panic, kernel oops, unexpected reboot, etc),
so maybe you see something else.


P.S. true, problem reporting to Red Hat has been ineffective for
the last 10 years or so. On the other hand, I reported a ZFS problem
to ZFS and got lively replies, some of them even helpful, and got
my ZFS problem solved. So not all doom and gloom, not everywhere.


K.O.




On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 12:52:11PM -0400, Larry Linder wrote:
> This really off topic but there REL error reporting does not work.
> It is not a centOS tool but RedHat.
> 
> Saturday PM - first failure.  At least we could reboot system.
> Sunday AM - second failure.  System is dead and SL 6.9 must be
> reinstalled before Monday.
> 
> Tried to install centOS 8 and it gets to point where I sets up disks in
> classical scheme, so as not to clobber users files, 
> it asks for root pass word and it crashes.  The crash is reproducible
> but the result Saturday was recoverable, Sunday's crash is not
> recoverable.
> 
> I checked download for errors and it agrees with their check sums.
> 
> Have been a SL user since 4.1 and never seen anything like this.  I wish
> SL could continue as the centOS 8 is half baked.  You can't send an
> error message to them !!!  The Red Hat bug reporting tool goes no where.
> This is why we never used Fedora - you couldn't thrust it.
> 
> We had planned to up date our business to centOS 8 but I think we will
> stick with SL 7.6 and update all system to that level and quit for a
> year.
> 
> I would like to thank all the troops and contributors to SL for an
> outstanding work.
> 
> If anyone know how to forward the error messages to centOS I will try a
> third time next weekend.
> 
> Thank You
> Larry Linder
> MicroControls LLC

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada