Error Installation failed external command finished with errors

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

Greetings! Trying EndeavourOS for the first time but I think I have a greedy setup which failed at install.
I have EFI partition with win10. I also want a separate /home partition. Did the manual partition following the usual guidelines and ended up with this message:

2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]:     .. Running ("udevadm", "settle") 
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]:     .. Running ("sync") 
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [1]: void Calamares::ViewManager::onInstallationFailed(const QString&, const QString&)
    ERROR: Installation failed: "External command finished with errors." 
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]:     .. - message: "External command finished with errors." 
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]:     .. - details: Command <i>chown</i> finished with exit code 1.
Output:
chown: changing ownership of '/home/replica/.bash_logout': Operation not permitted
chown: changing ownership of '/home/replica': Operation not permitted
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]: void Calamares::ViewManager::onInstallationFailed(const QString&, const QString&)
    Calamares will quit when the dialog closes. 
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]: QML Component (default slideshow) deactivated
2023-09-13 - 02:36:30 [6]: void Config::doNotify(bool, bool)
    Notification not sent; completion: failed

Full log: https://termbin.com/7vy5

So yeah. Calamares wasn’t able to finish the job. The only unusual thing I did was to format the /home partition as Exfat :nauseated_face: because I want it to be accessible to windows as well. Too greedy? or the error is due to something else?

Thank you for your time reading this :pray:

2

/home/ on a non-Linux/Unix file system does not sound like a good idea, regardless if this caused your issue or not.

I would suggest instead creating a folder within your ~ that you use to share the data between Windows and Linux. Perhaps set up ~/Documents as an exfat mountpoint or make a new one like ~/winux (or whatever you want to call it)?

1 Like
3

looks like chown is not supported on exfat.

You should definitely pick up on the idea that @hook suggested and use a separate partition to share files with Windows and mount it in /etc/fstab - you can mount it inside your /home/USER folder or on /mnt or /media - after all, mount-points are handled like folders on Linux.
All system-relevant folders should be on partitions with a linux-native file system, and your /home is a system-relevant folder.

1 Like
4

Thank you so much for the support guys.

Tried with ext4 and EndeavourOS installed just fine. Could have tried with fat32 as probably had better Linux support but no files over 4GB is not feasible these days.

Oddly enough apparently windows has now some sort of support for ext4 so I might be able to mount my /home partition in windows. Better than having one partition for steam, another for videos, pictures and so on.

Here’s a video guide if someone else is interested. Perhaps another crazy tries to do the same setup

Good luck.