Bug#283318: Installation results in an unbootable system
> I'm not familiar with grub, but error 18 indicates a problem with the
> disk geometry. And indeed after the reboot the BIOS recognizes a wrong
> disk geometry (495 MB instead of the original 4.3 GB).
> I have retried the installation, even with another board
> (MS6140 / Celeron 300A), but I always get the same result.
> I had to overwrite the disk (with dd) to get the original disk geometry
> back (displayed in the BIOS).
Hmmm, I have no clue about that. It sounds like a grub-related problem
rather than grub-installer, but I'm unsure.
> - It would be nice to have a rescue boot mode as with the woody disks.
It's being worked on, but the new package is fairly new and is not
likely to be added to the released version.
>
> - The network config happily ignores a missing dhcp server:
> "The network autoconfiguration was successful." ... but nothing was
> configured!
> It should switch to manual configuration mode instead or at least give
> an adequate error message.
This is absolutely *not* the expected behaviour. In the situation
where DHCP fails, you are normally returned to a screen giving you the
opportunity to either continue with an unconfigured network, or
conigure manually.
For some reason, the system thought that DHCP was successful. The only
solution for debugging this is restarting the install up to this step,
switch to vt2 and check the network configuration, at the moment this
screen shows up.
You can do it on the installed system as, at this moment, nothing has
to we written on the hard disk yet.
> - There are often empty "blue screens" for a more or less lasting time
> during the installation (e.g. between partitioning and installing
> the base system).
> This may not be a problem on a fast machine. But on a slower machine
> this may give the impression of a crashed installation, especially
> for windows users.
> If the system has to do something there should be a message or a
> progress bar on the screen, but not an empty screen.
Most of these have been hunted down (several D-I developers work with
vmware or qemu andthus also have slow machines).
Those which remain are either unknown or quite hard to fill in with
something..:-)
If you have the opportunity to restart this install, please note
exactly when such screens appear. You mention one between the
partitioning step and the base system install : was it after all
filesystems creation and before the first progress bar of the base
sstem install?
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