Bug#604839: installation-guide: USB booting/Syslinux info outdated
Package: installation-guide
Severity: normal
Tags: d-i
Hi,
With the rising popularity of such devices, booting from USB
memory sticks is probably becoming the most common method of
running the Debian Installer. At the same time, introduction
of isohybrid images made HD images mostly obsolete, I think.
Still, section 4.3. (Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick
Booting) does not even mention this.
Speaking about HD images: to my surprise they don't contain a
partition table, so they are more partition images instead.
Regardless, they usually work as full disk images, because the
Syslinux boot sector works well in the MBR as well. But not
always, cf. #604245 (still under investigation). But anyway,
why is this so? This is inconsistent with the "flexible way"
and also with the isohybrid ISOs. This also takes away the
possibility of repartitioning the image (after writing it) to
make room for firmware or whatever...
For squeeze, this sentence should be deleted from 4.3.2.2.:
If you want to rename the files, please note that syslinux
can only process DOS (8.3) file names.
It's complicated business, cf.
http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/Common_Problems#What.27s_the_real_name_of_that_file.3F
for further details. In practice, long filenames work all right.
One more addition: the syslinux package contains MBR code as
well, there's no need to install the mbr package, as 4.3.3.
suggests. One can simply cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin >/dev/sdX
and make the boot partition the only active one.
Finally, as #509938 points out, Syslinux isn't restricted to
FAT since 4.00. This may be worth mentioning at least; I guess
everybody with an EXT[234] formatted USB stick would be able to
install Syslinux on it (via the extlinux command et al.)
In summary I think a moderate overhaul of this section is needed,
and I'm willing to help out. But I'm not sure about the status
of the isohybrid images vs. boot.img.gz-s, for example...
--
Regards,
Feri.
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