Installing Bare Metal on Mac Mini (late 2012) fails with "fsconfig system call failed: /dev/disk/by-label/root: Can't lookup blockdev."

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1

Hi all,
I am trying to set up an old Mac Mini as a testing environment for FCOS.

I am using a minimal ignition file as a first step:

{
  "ignition": {
    "version": "3.4.0"
  },
  "passwd": {
    "users": [
      {
        "groups": [
          "sudo"
        ],
        "name": "leopam",
        "sshAuthorizedKeys": [
          "ecdsa-sha2-nistp521 AAAA...== leopam@leopam.leopam"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

I provision with

sudo coreos-installer install /dev/sda --insecure-ignition --ignition-url http://192.168.178.12:8000/mini.ign

sudo reboot

after the reboot I am greeted with this error:
“fsconfig system call failed: /dev/disk/by-label/root: Can’t lookup blockdev.”

error
error1310Ă—1151 289 KB

I am not sure what is going wrong and would be grateful for any advice on how to troubleshoot this.

/dev/sda is a 128GB SSD

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2

Added ignition, installation

3

How / where did you run the coreos-installer command? Is there just one disk in this system?

4

Thank you for your reply Timothée!

I booted from a fcos live stick and ran the command from there.

There is another 2TB HDD in the box as sdb.

5

I would try removing the other disk or wiping the partitions there. Not sure if that’s the source of your issue but it’s a common issue.

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6

I just tested installing fedora-coreos-40.20240701.3.0-live.x86_64.iso via USB stick on a bare metal machine and it works.

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7

Ok will try that. Glad to hear that this is not uncommon. I was afraid that apple hardware might not be suited.

Could disconnect sdb during install only and reconnect after that to be able to mount it later?
Or will it always fail if it is connected at boot?

At some point I want to have an ignition file that mounts stuff from that second disk.

8

Unfortunately I don’t have Apple hardware to test with.

If you have important data you want to keep, it’s better to disconnect the device, although Ignition won’t touch it unless you tell it to.

If is operational, it shouldn’t fail, but to narrow down the issue, try to install FCOS to a single SSD drive.

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9

I would start by disconnecting the disk and seeing if that fixes things.

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10

Thank you all!
I was able to solve it.
In the end the problem was, that I had to wipe sda via wipefs -a before installing.
I had assumed that this would happen during installation.

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