Re: debootstrap install with etch

[Harmon Seaver <hseaver@gmail.com>]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 01:09:10AM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>>    This has got to be the most problematic install I've ever had, I
>> think. I have no idea how many times I've had to reboot to the "good"
>> install on the internal scsi drive to try to fix something on the
>> debootstrap install on the external drive. The docs at
>> http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/alpha/apds03.html.en#id2549076 gave
>> as their final instruction to run "tasksel install standard" for a more
>> complete system, which I did. Wish I hadn't. One thing it did was to
>> totally overwrite my /etc/fstab file with totally erroneus drive mapping
> 
> That doesn't make any sense, frankly.  Nothing should ever overwrite
> /etc/fstab, and certainly nothing should do so after you've already done a
> base install with debootstrap.
> 

   Yeah, I know -- no sense whatsoever, but that's what it did. I had
previously set up fstab by hand, first copying the internal drive's
fstab then modifying it to reflect the /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sda --
and what tasksel put in there had no relation to that fstab whatsoever
-- not even in the same order, and all /dev/hda -- even the cdrom was
changed from /dev/scd0 mounted at /media/cdrom0 to /dev/cdrom at cdrom.
Very strange -- I have no clue where it was getting that from.



>>    But now it still boots weird -- the main screen, whether I do a
>> serial console boot or a regular tga console boot, never shows the total
>> boot -- that is, you never get a login prompt. I thought for awhile that
>> the boot was totally failing, but then saw in my server logs that it was
>> getting an IP, so tried to ssh into it, and it seems like it's all
>> booted and running normally -- just no console at all.
> 
> I'd guess this is a result of debootstrap not setting up /etc/inittab for
> you; and possibly other bits of system config that are handled by the
> installer, not by debootstrap.  debootstrap will give you all the packages
> from the base system, but there is no longer a base-config package to do
> base configuration, so certain things like /etc/inittab, /etc/fstab,
> /etc/networking are going to be unconfigured at the end of debootstrap and
> need to be set up by hand.
> 
   Yes, and I did all that. But I just now checked inittab, thinking
that since fstab got overwritten, maybe inittab did too -- but what was
wrong there was it looked like I must have done a copy from "more
/etc/fstab" as it had one line missing and extra characters in the
preceeding line.
   Thanks. Now it boots to a login prompt.


-- 
Harmon Seaver