FWIW, another problem I had with installing StartOS was that I first tried to flash startOS on to a 32gb USB stick on a Windows computer that had a 32gb RAM drive defined as the Windows temp drive (TEMP=x:). Everything went fine per the documentation instructions and Balencia UI for the flashing part. Balencia said, “Flashing was successful” (or something like that), but then it reported “Something went wrong with the validation … and showed me the TEMP RAM disk pathname.”
I thought, okay, the flashing part worked and only the validation failed, so the flash drive must be okay. But it was not okay. When I tried to boot/install startOS on the target machine, the flash drive blinked for a while with data access, and then just hung.
After a few tries of reflashing, I got smart enough to flash it on a machine whose temp drive was on an SSD disk instead of a RAM disk. Then the USB stick did not hang during installation.
Probably this will never happen to anyone else, but I post it here just in case. I have no idea why a 32gb RAM drive would fail on validation but not on flashing a 1.5 gb startOS file. Maybe the validation on the 32gb flash drive required a double copy on the 32gb RAM drive? Anyway, don’t do what I did.
Hi Dave, no, I did not pick the wrong drive. The Balena script is inadequate and cannot handle a temp drive on a RAM disk. I understand that it is “not Start9” software. But it is a critical part of the Start9 installation process, was not documented in any way ("I was the first in 3 years … … you recognize the line, I’m sure), and the issue did block me from my goal of a smooth Start9 installation.
And no, I didn’t fix anything. I just bypassed the issues by going outside the doc, outside the inadequate Balena software, and outside the process to find a solution that worked on a different machine that I happened to have around.
The only thing I did was waste time on the issue, so I reported it to the forum to make it visible to others. Do with it as you wish - it wouldn’t bother me in the least if you deleted the whole thread. Because it is unlikely that anyone else will ever run into the issue. The only reason I hit the issue is that I have 128GB of RAM installed on this machine and so could afford to have a huge RAM disk of 32GB to trigger the problem. I don’t think that will be an issue for most other people.
We will of course leave this post here for anyone else that hits this. I don’t think we would delete any forum posts that aren’t explicitly abusive or spam. Thanks for clarifying, I’ll mark your reply as the solution.
