Paul Millar wrote: > [I have a sinking feeling I'm doing something stupid here. Can't think what, > though, and d-i should crash like this anyway.] Well, a few things you could try are booting the 2.4 kernel instead of 2.6 (or vice-versa) and maybe trying a newer or later build of the installer. > I (think) I follow your argument with d-i and anna. It certainly seems > logical, but I don't know enough about how anna or mainmenu are supposed to > work to say more. > > Guessing, I'd say the d-i crash somehow caused d-i and anna to loose its > state, hence the complete re-install and confused behaviour. Perhaps init > restarting d-i somehow didn't start d-i from its initial state (temporary > files already existing?) -- but this is all guess-work. > > I've copied the contents of the /var/lib/dpkg directory to: > http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/debian-boot/dpkg/ > Curiously enough, there's two status files (status and status.bak). Is this > normal? Yes, it's normal and your status files look ok. > With gdb, I'm no expert, but I have used it in anger. If you can point me in > the direction of a suitable initrd image (say, running d-i through gdb > somehow) or just a udeb of gdb (for manual interaction) I can probably report > a trace-back of the stack after the crash. The following mini iso includes a copy of gdb. You should be able to boot in expert mode, switch to vt 2, use ps to find the pid of main-menu (hopefully before it crashes and is restarted) and attach gdb to it. The main-menu is an unstripped version, so gdb should work fairly well, although without source on there, it will be slightly limited. A backtrace should do. http://kitenet.net/~joey/tmp/mini.iso -- see shy jo
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