NixOS Installer not completing installation, and failing to install NixOS

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1

Hello wonderful people— i have a persistent problem, namely that the installation will not(!!!) succeed.

I have tried:

  • Minimal install from netboot x5

  • Minimal install from ventoy x3

  • gnome iso install live ventoy x>10

  • gnome iso install live usb x4 + 3 + 2

  • gnome iso install live CD X5

I dont think its my system, because:

  • its a relativley modern system:

– Nvidia rtx 4000 quadro

– Intel Core i7-4790K Processor

– 32Gb RAM (16GB (2x8GB) DDR3-1600 MHz Corsair Vengeance CML16GX3M2A1600C9 1600MHz)x2

– Mobo: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z87M-D3H

– 1TB Toshiba SSD

– DVD-burner Sony Optiarc AD-7240S

  • I have run both fedora and mint on this system, and nixos, before this debacle started.

  • I have installed, before, and during, and in between the nix attempts; and they all worked great.

Now, the problems began when trying to upgrade my nix system from 24.05 to 25.11 Vicuña, the rebuild did not for the life of it complete, the error messages repeatedly was related to: packages failing to install due to dependencies failing to install due to lzama decompression failures. searching for this only gave me suggestions to essentially “try again”, and eventually i reached the suggestion “reinstall new system”. and i thought no at first— tried to patch the issue. but eventually as I’m not a computer literate person I gave up on that front; and finally i wiped my drive completely. And install attempt 1 started.

I managed to get to 46%— which seems common- it taking slow was not at all an issue- my problem unlike others was that it crashet like two seconds in, so i powered through on the assumption that others said, that it would continue where it left off, which it seemed like it did, because the failed packages were always new, and fewer and fewer, and by remake 9 or 15 or 20 on attempt 12 i did it!

Or so i thought…

No, for the New system had an Systemd issue. it couldn’t rebuild switch or build env or even shells, it reported issue with a incorrect name on some VScode file- due to a goddamn Lzama error- and it wouldn’t let me go and fix the ◊? forbidden character with the character it claimed to expect of that package- so i set to fix systemd via external usb install. but of course this was way above my head- and i couldn’t manage— so naturally i decided to give up and try my luck again with installing fresh from a newly imported fresh from the web USB live ISO- and now this is my 4th week of trying repeatedly for like 4 hrs a day.

So I ask, what am i doing wrong, why are these issues of Lzama and systemd so consistent? is there any way to fix this???

I ask and won’t give up because of how much i loved Nix the year i used it, it was so convenient, and i felt like i got more and more competent, and learned more and more of how a computer thinks and i loved the control i had of my environment. and the elegance i’ve reached in my config file… I really want to make this work, so that i can continue to recommend it to everyone- because i did a whole year, and now i’ve kinda had to shut up about it lol.

2

Uh, I would be very skeptical that this actually worked at all. It seriously sounds like your hardware is failing pretty badly, and what it’s installing is probably heavily corrupted. Check dmesg and see if there are any memory errors.

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3

Well, it didn’t, but it did boot, the row right after reports this. When I ran a health check via fedora like 5 days ago no faults were reported- I don’t think it was dmesg- but some fedora utility tool:

— I’ll try doing that again yes, properly this time, and actually save the results- which would’ve been proper helpful atp…

4

actually- i did this- prompted by you but not that exactly

sudo gnome-disks

then in gnome disks i went through the various partitions checking them, and it did report my boot partition as broken, i marked it for repair, tried to run the installation, and now it worked!!! somehow!!!

i would have assumed it would be repaired at repartitioning but apparently that one easy thing was all i needed???

anyway, thank you very much!!! <3<3<3<3

(my conclusion that it now works is that i now can do nix commands, like nix-shell and nixos-rebuild switch- which the previous faux success could not)

5

If you didn’t actually wipe the drive and reinstall, then I’m still skeptical that it’s ok. Corrupt files could be lingering in your nix store where you just haven’t noticed them yet.

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