Bug#222381: installation-reports: Installation Report
Package: installation-reports
Version: N/A; reported 2003-11-28
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable
Target:
Dell Workstation 400
Dual 9.1 GiB SCSI Hard Drives and Plexor CDR attached to a PCI 2940UW SCSI card
128MiB Ram
Single PII @300 MHz
Matrox Mill II
*The bios does not recognize the scsi as a boot device*
This system has only two methods of booting: Floppy or Netboot.
3C905C with PXE
Report:
Wow, this is a very nice change. I required the 3COM drivers to boot a kernel.
With the new installer it was simply a quick job of mounting the initrd, chrooting
and doing a udpkg -i net-extras.udeb. Very nice.
Had some issues with the ramdisk. I set the pxelinux kernel options as follows:
ramdisk_size=8192 root=/dev/ram initrd=kernel-initrd (I'm a bit lazy at 3:00am).
This information should be in the documentation.
In this situation, the cdrom is not recognized until the scsi modules are loaded.
And even if the cdrom is recognized, I do not have a desire to load from the cd.
So, if the installer modules did not load correctly, I would be stuck in a loop
of configuring the CD-ROM. Kind of bad
Another irratation is the removal of a break from the installer process. In the
older installer, if things were failing, I could hit ctrl-C and the installer
would restart. This should be reimplemented.
After things got burning, I found another issue. In my situation, I need to move
the initrd as well as the vmlinux to the netboot server. So I tried the default
of scp (DOH.. This is an installer), ftp and finally nfs. Shock and amazement,
nothing worked. I was saved by doing a chroot to the target and apt-getting
ftp. It was very ugly, but it worked.
Doing a base-config in the installer would have solved my issue of moving the
initrd and vmlinuz if it worked. I selected the 2.6.0-test9 and the
base-config failed. It would be very nice to allow another choice of doing
a complete configuration within the debinstaller. Then downloading ssh and
doing anything required is very simple.
Post reboot is ugly. I now get the dreaded dev/console not found.
It looks like the pivot-root command is not in the 2.6 initrd.
Needs more investigation....
Good night.
-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux FireWhip 2.4.18-cent-grsec #1 Sat Aug 16 16:45:04 PDT 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
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