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SuSE 10.1 in VMware “No catalogue found” error SOLVED

Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 11:47 pm | 6,032 views | trackback url
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It seems that quite a few people (including myself) ran into trouble trying to get SuSE 10.1 GM to install from DVD in VMware.

The exact error you’ll get will be: 

No catalogue found at dvd:///?devices%3d%2fdev%2fhdc

After a bit of tinkering with the DVD image, I realized that it was a problem with the .iso file itself. The md5sums matched perfectly, and the DVD was “intact”, it was just incorrect because the wrong mkisofs params were used when it was created. You’ll need to mount, copy the contents out, and rebuild the ISO with the proper options to make it work as a bootable ISO for VMware.

The following steps will fix it: 

# Mount the original ISO as a loopback image
mount -oloop SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-DVD-i386.iso /mnt/SuSE

# Copy all of the files out of the image to a directory on disk
rsync -avSP /mnt/SuSE/. /tmp/SuSE

# Rebuild the ISO image with the proper parameters
mkisofs -v -V SuSE10.1GM -r -J -l -L -P "OpenSuSE Linux 10.1 GM" \
-b "boot/i386/loader/isolinux.bin" -c "boot/i386/loader/boot.cat" \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -graft-points \
-o /tmp/SuSE-Linux-10.1-DVD.iso /tmp/SuSE

Voila! Problem solved!

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Last Modified: Saturday, June 10th, 2006 @ 23:47

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24 Responses to “SuSE 10.1 in VMware “No catalogue found” error SOLVED”

  1. Thomas Muders said on June 16th, 2006 at 3:44 am quote

    This is not a new Suse problem. I have experienced it since Suse 9. something.
    I wonder why nobody fixes it.

  2. Arcterex said on June 17th, 2006 at 3:18 pm quote

    Thanks for the info! I was just getting ready to re-download the DVD when I found this :)

  3. Mads said on June 21st, 2006 at 10:51 am quote

    I just tried your fix.

    I got some errors when using rsync but was able to generate a new iso file by following your instructions…

    But I still have the same error ?

  4. Mads said on June 22nd, 2006 at 1:35 am quote

    Sorry about this…. it seems that the were something wrong with my org. ISO file. So I am trying your solution again…

  5. Mads said on June 22nd, 2006 at 2:13 am quote

    It works great!

    Many thanks for this solution!

  6. vibe666 said on June 26th, 2006 at 5:43 am quote

    this isn’t a problem with the image, it’s a problem with the way vmware handles the iso file as a virtual device.

    i have installed it perfectly on both virtual pc 2004 and ms virtual server 2005 r2 without any errors.

    the same image gives the above error in vmware 5.5 though, so i have to take it from that that there is a problem with the way vmware handles the image rather than there being a problem with the image itself.

    since i don’t currently have a working linuxinstallation i’m a bit stuck for your fix, so i will have to try a different workaround.

    i’m thinking maybe mounting the iso in deamon tools and letting vmware use it as a physical drive rather than letting vmware mount the image itself and see how that goes.

    i’ll keep you all posted.

  7. David A. Desrosiers said on June 26th, 2006 at 6:24 am quote

    It is absolutely a problem with the actual .ISO image itself. I’ve installed over 300 different systems in VMware on Linux from bootable ISO images, and SuSE is the ONLY one that I’ve had this problem with.

    Look at the above comments, lots of people have reported the same issue and this fix solves it for them. This is not just with VMware, but with physical machine booting as well.

    Your experience with Virtual PC 2004 and MS Virtual Server 2005 only reflect how it works on YOUR hardware, but not how it works in the Linux environment and on other hardware.

    The ISO file is rolled wrong.

  8. vibe666 said on June 27th, 2006 at 7:29 am quote

    mounting the image in another application such as daemon tools or alcohol 120% and then using that drive as a physical drive in VMWare results in no errors at all.

    much quicker and a lot less hassle than rebuilding the ISO.

  9. David A. Desrosiers said on June 27th, 2006 at 7:57 am quote

    Not very useful to non-Windows users, however.

    There is no equivalent process in Linux to do the same thing, so rebuilding the ISO is the only option.

  10. vibe666 said on June 27th, 2006 at 8:32 am quote

    you should be able to mount the ISO in linux like this by creating a mount point for it:

    BASH# mkdir /mnt/iso

    then you should be able to mount the ISO in the mount point with the following command:

    BASH# mount image.iso /mnt/iso/ -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0

    Where image.iso is your ISO file.

    you can also mount bin/cue files with a little app called CDemu: http://cdemu.sourceforge.net/ should you have the need.

    sorry to be a know it all, but its in my nature. ;-)

  11. David A. Desrosiers said on June 27th, 2006 at 8:43 am quote

    You’re not a know-it-all at all because this doesn’t work.

    Have you tried it? I have, and it doesn’t work, because you can’t point VMware to a mountpoint to boot a bootable loopback image. You can’t boot anything in vmware from a directory, period. Check the VMware forums for posts from people asking about this exact point.

    The 1,200 or so people who are having this problem with the SuSE ISO images aren’t all idiots, we do know what we’re doing. If it works for you under Windows, with your Windows tools, then great!

    SuSE recognizes the problem, and from what I’ve been told, they are fixing it.

  12. vibe666 said on June 27th, 2006 at 8:59 am quote

    why would i bother trying it?

    it works fine for me. ;-)

  13. David A. Desrosiers said on June 27th, 2006 at 9:55 am quote

    Self-proclaimed ‘know-it-alls’ tend to suggest things they’ve never tried and insist that its the answer. This is no exception.

    In any case, my fix works (as recognized by hundreds in the community now, and SuSE), and your untested suggestions do not, except perhaps on Windows.

  14. nic said on July 6th, 2006 at 2:51 pm quote

    worked great for me. thanks.

    David, lighten up :)

  15. Stofzuiger said on July 12th, 2006 at 4:45 pm quote

    Thanks,

    You’re solution worked fine for me! (Vmware Server 1.0)

  16. Bone Head said on July 13th, 2006 at 3:32 am quote

    I have the same “No catalogue found” error with the x86_64 DVD.

    Have followed modified (s/i386/x86_64/) versions of the steps above, and burned a new DVD from the ISO (md5sum: f323f7fbd12642c537e2c960f008551e). This one exhibits _exactly_ the same problem.

    At this point I’m not sure if there is something else I should have done when creating the ISO to suit the fact it was for x86_64 rather than i386. I’m also not sure if this really is the problem.

    I’ve seen suggestions of aborting and restarting the installer in other forums. I’ve also seen mention of this only affecting installations in VMware. I’m attempting this install on a Dell 670MT, that is currently running FC5-x86_64.

    Another forum even talked about some kind of admission, by Novell, of this problem. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything on the Novell site about it. :-(

  17. Ess said on July 29th, 2006 at 8:42 pm quote

    Tried installing Suse 10.1 on VMWare and couldn’t. Read the posts here, used 120% and successfully installed Suse. Thanks to all those who have contributed and keep up the good work. Now thinking about purchasing a Licensed version of Suse…as I love the interface on Suse Enterprise Desktop, and seems to offer all the tools I need.

  18. m said on August 8th, 2006 at 3:20 pm quote

    I found an easy work around running VMWare on a Windows host: Mount the image using Daemon Tools and point the virtual machine to the Daemon Tools drive.

  19. fizzix said on September 4th, 2006 at 4:19 pm quote

    Voila, problem solved (not!)
    I carefully read the discussion here, and decided to follow your instructions for rebuilding the iso-file and burned it to dvd.
    (I didn’t know one could mount an iso file, so I learned something)
    OK, now booting from that dvd: everything goes fine, untill the nasty announcement:
    Software:
    No Catalog Found At ‘dvd:///?devices%3d%2fdev%2fhdc’
    grumbl…

    then I tried the following:
    -> Cancel the installation…
    -> Inside Main Menu press “Verify installations-CD-ROM/DVD”
    -> answer: This is not a SuSE dvd

    any suggestions?

  20. David A. Desrosiers said on September 4th, 2006 at 4:32 pm quote

    It looks like you didn’t rebuild the ISO properly. Are you sure you burned the NEW ISO to DVD and booted that? Its very unlikely you would get the same exact error after booting the new one that you did before with the original.

    I’d try again, and be careful to double-check those options. It works here and for hundreds of others.

  21. John Mitchell said on September 5th, 2006 at 6:26 am quote

    Well I didn’t have a problem installing, the problem I have is getting VMware tools to install. I haven’t found a fix for that yet!

  22. deJaya said on October 12th, 2006 at 3:21 pm quote

    Had the same error. Using Alcohol 120% on winXP to mount the image worked perfectly for me. Thanks for the help everyone ;-)

  23. Dave said on November 5th, 2006 at 1:42 am quote

    I’m a Mac guy trying to install SUSE 10 into Parallels. Limited Windows skills. Zero Linux skills. Anybody know how to fix this in Mac OSX?

  24. Sockpuppet said on February 13th, 2007 at 9:39 am quote

    I used Daemon tools to mount the image and set the VMware host to connect on power-up and it still errored! I’m going to try red-hat instead


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