For this install I used images built using a number of localudebs, but I hope that the last of those will have gotten into the archive either today or tomorrow and I will then be able to try it again with autobuilt images. I wrote the bootfloppy image to a floppy, and copied dest/hd-media-initrd.gz to /keychain/initrd.gz (on the first (FAT) partition on my 128 mb USB keychain which I bought at an evil American mass-market store). Overnight I had downloaded yesterday's build of sarge-i386-netinst.iso; I copied that to keychain as well (it just fit). I booted the installer using the floppy as my laptop's BIOS does not support direct boots from other USB media. The installer immediatly saw the keychain's initrd, loaded it, and I was asked for my language. Then the installer did hardware detection, automatically found the iso on the keychain, and loaded all the udebs from it. All quite fast, and pretty slick. At this point, main-menu crashed, and I was left staring at a "Something went wrong. Press enter to continue." prompt, which, if I had not written it, I would have to say is awefully vague and unhelpful. :-/ But it does highlight this main-menu crash, which I think we have been seeing for ages and never tracked down. It seemed to happen after all the udebs were loaded, when main-menu struggled to cope with the new system status. Or something like that. Needs a debugger. I hit enter to continue, and the installer prompted me about partitioning. This prompt was a wee bit confusing (this is the first time I have gotten this far with the installer), since it asked for a drive to partition, but did not mention how it was going to partition it. With scary thoughts of automatic repartitioning of my precious (and only) laptop hard drive, I went ahead and selected it. (I note that the list of drives to partition included the USB memory stick that I was installing from. Not likely to be a good idea. It also included my USB floppy device.) In cfdisk, I told it to change my 128 mb swap partition to ext2, and write and quit. For some reason the next screen (picking partitions to mount?) still identified it as type swap. I went back and checked, it was ext2 according to fdisk. Still swap as far as d-i knew, but I went ahead and told it to mount that as the root partition. Lacking any other partitions, I continued with the install. Now it copied all the base debs over to my little target partition, which seemed a little strage, since it was so small, and the debs were already there on the "cdrom". Waste of disk space and time. Then it installed them all, up to the point when I got an error message saying debootstrap had failed, and that perhaps /target/var/log/debootstrap.log would say why. I checked, and that file was empty. I looked at the consoles, and vt3 said it was out of space (of course). This error message could be much better. At this point I gave up, picked the reboot menu item, and quit the install attempt. I expect that if I had a little bit more free space on a throwaway partition, and if grub worked, I would have had a successful install. -- see shy jo
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