Problem installing base and base-devel on Arch

Question

I recently decided to try out Arch Linux, but I am having problems installing the base and base-devel packages. First, here are my partitions:

sda2 home 350GB (ext4)
sda4 root 30GB (ext4)
sda3 boot 7GB (fat32)

I figured I didn't need a swap partition yet, cause I have 6GB of RAM, which I assume is enough to install Arch. The boot partition is larger than normal because I have ~35GB free space, and based on my research, some were saying that the boot partition was too small.

Then, after setting the server mirror and mounting the partitions, I synchronized the package databases just to be sure:

pacman -Syy

And here is where I encountered the first problem. When executing pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel and selecting all packages, I got these warnings:

warning: skipping target: file
warning: skipping target: fileutils
warning: skipping target: gawk
warning: skipping target: gettext
warning: skipping target: grep
warning: skipping target: gzip
warning: skipping target: pacman
warning: skipping target: sed
warning: skipping target: texinfo
warning: skipping target: util-linux
warning: skipping target: which

I thought it was odd, but I decided to proceed with the installation. Then, I got these errors. The first error actually prints about 50 times, but I snipped it to prevent spam:

error: could not open file /mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg/vi-1:070224-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz.part: Invalid argument
warning: failed to retrieve some files
error: failed to commit transaction (failed to retrieve some files)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
==> ERROR: Failed to install packages to new root

So naturally, I searched on the internet for the error, and a bunch of old forum posts came up. A couple said to make the boot partition larger, which is why it is 7GB instead of 500MB like it was before. Another one said to try changing the server mirror, remove the file /mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg/vi-1:070224-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz.part, and try again. Still, no success.

None of the solutions I have found work, and I am not sure how to continue. I have done the process a few times, but the problem seems to happen each time. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, feel free to comment!

Edit: Yup, I do have internet connection.

Solution

Alright. Thanks to @immilesahead, it is finally working. Here's what I did:

(1) Restart the computer

(2) Format and erase partitions

(3) Recreate partitions root, home, and boot

(4) Execute:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdaX # root partition
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdaX # home partition
mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdaX # boot partition, UEFI only!

(5) Install the packages again without running pacman -Syy

(6) ???

(7) Profit

Comments

[jasonwryan]

100MB is sufficient for /boot (unless you are dual booting). Your initial error suggests that you hadn't mounted / on /mnt.

[Aaron Esau]

@jasonwryan Thanks for the reply! I'm not dual-booting. It should be mounted though. Just in case, here's the mount command I ran: mount /dev/sda4 /mnt. Oh, and ls /mnt suggests it is mounted.

[maxf]

You'll also want to format boot with something like ext4, in case you ever want to use symlinks for e.g. your current kernel. You normally do not synchronize the package database before installing Arch because that will put the database to /var while you want it to be in /mnt/var (except when using -c, but you don't do that during an initial install). Since / is a tmpfs and you put the package db there - how much is still free on it (df -h)?

[Aaron Esau]

@maxf It says / is airootfs, but there are some tmpfs ones: /dev/shm, /sys/fs/cgroup, /tmp, /etc/pacman.d. But there is 244MB free on /.

[Aaron Esau]

I just noticed /run/archiso/bootmnt (742MB) and /run/archiso/sfs/airootfs (321MB) are 100% used. Does that matter?