Bug#736234: installation-reports: Boot loader install did not work
Hi Harri,
thanks for your installation report.
On 21.01.2014 11:13, Harri Kiiskinen wrote:
Problems:
- Network card: did not install drivers for wifi card, for iwlwifi-firmware was not on netinst cd. Wired connection worked ok.
This firmware is not on the netinst CD, because it is non-free. If you
need it, you can have the firmware in a /firmware folder and the
installer will install it, see [1].
- Boot loader: installation wanted to install grub-efi which did not work, as the computer rebooted itself directly to Windows. The partitioning process warned about the missing EFI
partition, but did not give _any_ hinst about what to do to remedy the situation. How do you add an EFI partition? Why should you do it? Should you do it? If there is an MBR installed, why
insist on using EFI? After rebooting using the netinst as rescue, I installed grub-pc for MBR-based boot, which worked. On the first run, grub did not find the dual installed Windows 7
Professional, but after a reboot and a rerun of update-grub, also the Windows installation was found.
Installing on an EFI system is a bit tricky, because one has to be
careful in which mode (EFI or BIOS) the installation is started, e.g.
booting 'EFI: CD' or 'BIOS: CD'. Depending on this, the installer
behaves differently. If the hard disk is partitioned as MBR, EFI
installation is not possible, so one should install via booting 'BIOS: CD'.
Thoughts and comments:
- A 'layperson' would not have been able to perform the install because of the EFI/MBR issues.
The issue lies in the BIOS, not in the installer.
- That the iwlwifi firmware was missing is understadable; however, there should be some reasonable instructions as how to fix the situation, i.e. fetch this package from here, put on an usb
stick and insert; press enter when done. Now the instructions talk about partitions and iwlwifi-firmware.ucode images; according to some internet comments, putting this file on a usb stick
and inserting does not even work, but the debian package is needed. Don't know, I installed the iwlwifi-firmware.deb from the non-free archives after rebooting with the rescue disk (see
above).
The problem is, that the installer does not know, which package contains
the firmware file.
The current message is:
Load missing firmware from removable media?
Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware files to operate. The
firmware can be loaded from removable media, such as a USB stick or
floppy.
.
The missing firmware files are: ${FILES}
.
If you have such media available now, insert it, and continue.
How do you think this can be improved?
Best regards,
Andreas
1: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware#Firmware_during_the_installation
Reply to: