Debian Installer Installs to the Wrong HD
First of all, I was recommended to email you from #debian on freenode
as a place to submit a bug report. If this is the wrong place to
email, I apologize. Assuming that this *is* the correct place, here is
the story.
Introduction:
I have three hard drives and two CD drives inside of my AMD x4 640
system (TA-785G3, Galaxy (Nvidia) 7500GT). sda (sata, broken
slackware), sdb (sata, main slackware), sdc (IDE, dev slackware) cd
drive 1(sata) sd drive 2(IDE). Both CD drives are Lite-On DVD burners
(both kinds) and the IDE one has LightScribe. I use Slackware and all
three of these had Slackware and the LILO bootloader on them with the
exception of sda (the target), which had a broken installation of
Slackware on it. I used the Debian 6.0.2.1 DVD (AMD64), downloaded
through BitTorrent, burned to a DVD-R, and it has passed md5sum tests.
Procedure:
I selected Install, went through selecting American English, and such.
When I got to the partitioning screen, I selected Manual and adjusted
sda so that it would have a main partition and a 3gb swap partition in
the back. The main partition was sd3, used as "/" with standard
options, and bootable. The swap was, well, swap. I went through the
installer choosing the following. No network mirrors (it downloaded
something anyway), no popcon, and whatever the very top, and very
bottom options are and ssh server (when selecting what I'd like to
install), Mountain time zone, grub to /dev/sda1 (the name of the swap
partition, which failed), grub to /dev/sda2, and then grub to
/dev/sda. The last two grub selections ran without error.
Results:
When I booted into /dev/sda, I got what was left of the slackware
installation that was originally there. I booted into /dev/sdb and did
some looking. sda's file system was untouched, but the partitions were
reversed (originally it was partition-swap, debian formatted it
swap-partition). Not thinking much more of it, I booted into my dev
environment, /dev/sdc, only to see a Debian grub bootloader (which
failed to boot Debian (See Appendix A)). All of my files on /dev/sdc
are gone, only to be replaced by the contents of a clean Debian
install (I have some backups, I'm not that stupid).
Conclusion:
Sorry for making this so long, but I did not want to waste your time
with a "plz hlp" letter. I have no idea what could have caused this to
happen, as I am not very familiar with Debian. Assuming that this is
the right email address, I will email you the results of what happens
when I have sda as the only drive connected to my computer and try to
install then.
Appendix A:
I wouldn't worry too much about the Debian-not-booting thing, I had
issues with booting 6.0 (but not 5.x). As much as I would like Debian
on my machine, the bootloader may just be incompatible with my setup.
Should you want them, here are the symptoms of my "not booting"
The regular graphic option has the computer just go to a black screen
where everything stops responding. The monitor does not receive input.
The "recovery option" scrolls a lot of text, but then repeats the same
symptoms as the regular option. On the previous version of debian, I
somehow (I forgot) got some text to say that the computer was
kernel-panicing, but I could not get it working and I forget what the
KP said exactly.
--
Congratulations on reading the whole thing.
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