Re: Installing Debian Buster on Cubox-i4 with eSATA drive.

["Rick Thomas" <rick.thomas@pobox.com>]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2021, at 11:15 PM, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> On 2021-01-27, Rick Thomas wrote:
> > I'm trying to install Debian Buster [1] on my Cubox-i4P with an eSATA
> > drive. Everything seems to be fine, but when it comes time to reboot,
> > it boots into the installer again, rather than the installed system.
> >
> > Here's what I did, and what I observed:
> >
> > *) I downloaded the two parts of the SDcard install image from [1] and followed the instructions in the README to create a 4GB (I didn't have anything smaller) SDcard installer.
> > *) I connected the eSATA disk and plugged the SDcard into the Cubox and powered it up.
> > *) It booted off the SD-card into the installer as expected.
> ...
> > *) But when the reboot happened, I found myself back in the installer.
> > *) I tried removing the SDcard and rebooting, but it failed to boot -- after power-on nothing happened.
> 
> > What I hoped would happen with the eSATA drive was that the installer
> > would write the boot firmware (u-boot, etc) to the SDcard, and
> > configure it to get /boot, root, /home, swap off the eSATA.
> 
> U-boot can only be loaded from microSD on that platform, as far as I'm
> aware.
> 
> You can use the bootloader from the installer image, just delete the
> boot.scr and/or extlinux.conf from the partition on the installer image,
> or make another partition on the microSD card, and mark it bootable, but
> don't put anything on it. Then u-boot should fall back to loading the
> kernel+initrd+device-tree off of the eSATA.
> 
> If you interrupt the boot process and get to a u-boot prompt, you should
> be able to see the order of devices u-boot tries to boot from with:
> 
>   printenv boot_targets
> 
> 
> Now that bullseye is in the early phases of freeze, please consider
> testing bullseye, too, if you can! :)

Thanks!  This sounds like it ought to work.  I'll give it a try.

For bullseye, where should I download the latest installer image from?  I'd love to give it a try as well!
Rick