Bug#222381: installation-reports: Installation Report
Owner <jeffy@myrealbox.com> writes:
> 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.
You should have read the default kernel options, you need devfs=mount.
> 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
If you don't want to install from CD don't download a CD which
installs from CD but the net variant.
> 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.
The missing nfs.o module is a bug. But once you have /target you have
the nfs modules there.
> Doing a base-config in the installer would have solved my issue of
> moving the initrd and vmlinuz if it worked. I selected the
There is a d-i component for this, maybe not included on your cd or
you overlooked it.
> 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.
That would be a bug in the mkinitrd program then.
MfG
Goswin
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