Bug#696877: installation-reports: Wheezy DI-b4-amd64-netboot-mini.iso from an usb stick fails trying to install grub
On 24/01/13 12:56, Steven Chamberlain wrote:
Thanks Paul,
On 24/01/13 12:22, Paul Bryan Roberts wrote:
# mount | grep cdrom
Ah of course, this is netboot...
# list-devices cd
/dev/sr0
# list-devices maybe-usb-floppy
# list-devices usb-partition
/dev/sda4
What exactly is sda4; is that where the mini.iso files are?
Yes, sda4 is where the mini.iso files.
It's sda4, not sda1, 'cos I formatted the USB stick to have the USB-ZIP
geometry according to the
notes on http://www.syslinux.org/doc/usbkey.txt.
Is it formatted as vfat?
No. ext2.
That was a mistake because the Debian Installer won't read firmware
blobs for wireless network devices from ext2 formatted partitions.
Seems you need vfat.
After the original installation, /boot/grub/device.map read:
(hd0) /dev/disk/by-id /usb-BUFFALO_ClipDrive_A3200510210000751-0:0
As a result, default_bootdev gets set to this.
GRUB will install there unless either:
* the device is mounted on /cdrom
* the device is mounted on /hd-media
* the install media was detected as hybrid iso9660 on USB
* the device has no partition, and yet it isn't a whole-drive filesystem
recognised by grub-probe
We need some novel way to detect that the installer is running from the
USB stick, but this isn't obvious from /proc/mounts or /proc/cmdline.
I suspect that if /dev/sda4 contained a directory ".disk/" containing an
empty file named "info", that might result in it being mounted on
/cdrom; then grub-installer would decide know not to install there.
Regards,
Umm, empty files under .disk/info sounds rather heuristic to me.
In that vein, as a first pass, I'd look for the file syslinux (or
extlinux usw.) in the root directory. I think it
unlikely such boot loaders would be used to boot off a pukka hard-drive.
I do like the idea that the grub install in most cases will be to the
device with the root partition for the installation just made BUT that
would not work with my RAIDed machines.
Regards,
--
Paul Bryan Roberts
pbronline-debian@yahoo.co.uk
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