1. partitioned and formatted disk(bios/msdos) sda1(ext2 /boot500mb), sda2 (ext4 /) sda3 (ext4 /home) with gparted in porteus(live distro)
ok
2. burned iso to disk
ok
3. booted disk
ok
4. updated obarun-install
ok
5. mounted partitions as per instructions(possible i did this incorrectly)
nothing complicate here, i do it for you :
first mount the / partition :
$ sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
then create directories boot and home
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/{boot,home}
then mount boot and home partition on correct directories
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
$ sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home
6. cd /opt/obarun-install
ok
7. sudo ./obarun.install ..choose 7.
download failed on several packages (bad network here i'd say)
that's a real problem, i checked my server to see if a problem occur on download process, seems ok for me. if packages are not correct the installation can't be good :). have you a pacman output saying you that you have a package corrupted?
8. repeated 7(or 8>resume failed install?). until all packages received and installed(didn't notice mkcpioinit failure)
the number 8 just skip the installation process, but if your packages aren't installed correctly, the installation can't be good here too.
9. continued through 9 and rebooted
10 stalls at vmlinuz
11. rebooted live disk ,remounted and had a look > no initramfs-linux.img s hmmmm and vmlinuz appeared to be 496mb!?!
this is absolutly anormal, the size of vmlinuz is around 4M, 3M for initramfs. if you don't have initramfs then the packages linux don't do work correctly. why? may be the packages is corrupted on downloading process
12. tried running installer step 9 (wrongly thinking that this was where mkinitcpio is run)(this added duplicate fstab entries)
(this added duplicate fstab entries), the duplicate was made when you run the number 8 (i maked a mistake, it's a bug, i need to make change for that).
you don't need to make the number 9 again and it's is not a good idea here, the number 9 define user, local etc etc, configuration stuff for pacman, user and runit and install syslinux is you want. but this number can not be run twice
13. thought maybe /boot partition was too small, so resized it to 2gb(overkill)
not, a partition with 100M is good enough
14. remounted and arch-chroot
ok
15. ran mkinitcpio -p (could have reinstalled linux?) (didnt want redownload the whole thing again)
just reinstall linux packages to see if the mkinitcpio process do correctly the stuff and make sure your packages isn't corrupted
16 rebooted to recovery shell(because of duplicate fstab entries) exit went to normal login etc
my fault cause bug :(.
17 removed fstab duplicate entries, boots normally
i think the principal trouble is the downloading failure, but what is puzzle me that you are not alone with the same problem (reddevil), i will go to make a test again but for the moment i don't see where the problem is with the scripts (if the scripts have trouble)