SliTaz Forum

thebigh

Member

Registered: 2026-05-01

Posts: 10

Problems installing to HDD- slitaz-installer quits to terminal partway through

Hi all,

I'm trying to install Slitaz to an old laptop from a live CD containing the rolling 32-bit iso and I'm having trouble getting it to work.

I've made an ext2 boot partition (ext3 and ext4 produce identical results), and run slitaz-installer with the following options:

* Fresh install on HDD

* install from LiveCD (internet ISO produced identical results)

* no separate home partition

* all default usernames and passwords

The installer quits back to the terminal after the question about installing a bootloader, regardless which I choose, and I can't complete the install. I'm also getting "Warning: file already exists" messages throughout, in case that matters.

I then tried the manual install procedure described here: https://hg.slitaz.org/website/raw-file/e52a6a4c10a6/en/doc/handbook/install.html

I found that I could not even create the /mnt/target/root directory because I had no permission, and I had to chown that directory to myself first.

Then I discovered there's not just one /media/cdrom/boot/rootfs.gz on the live CD, there's four of them, and I don't know which of the four I need. Assuming it's all of them I copied them over and tried to extract the first one, but then it told me there wasn't enough free space left. Which is not correct, there's still dozens of gig of empty space on that partition.

I'm completely confused. What am I doing wrong?

thebigh

Member

Registered: 2026-05-01

Posts: 10

Re: Problems installing to HDD- slitaz-installer quits to terminal partway through

I FIGURED IT OUT

In case anyone else runs into this problem, here's how I fixed it.

So it turns out that slitaz-installer wasn't saving any changes to tazinst.rc after creating the file; that's what all the "Warning: file already exists" messages were about. It was then running a bunch of empty commands so no wonder nothing was happening.

I opened tazinst.rc up in a text editor, manually entered the relevant options, and then ran 'texinst execute' in a terminal and it installed as expected.

There was still an error when it tried to copy rootfs.gz, because the live CD hasn't got that- it has rootfs1 through 4. That still concerned me a bit but my computer is booting properly so it mightn't matter.