Bug#764587: installation-reports: After successful installation from usb stick the stick is not recognised on reboot.

[Brian Potkin <claremont102@gmail.com>]

On Tue 25 Nov 2014 at 22:11:48 +1300, Philip Charles wrote:

> On Thu, 2014-10-09 at 23:32 +1300, Philip Charles wrote:
> > Package: installation-reports
> > Severity: normal
> >  After successful installation from usb stick the stick is not
> > recognised on reboot.
> > 
> > Boot method: usb stick
> > Image version: beta 2 installer amd64 DVD1 (copied to usb stick)
> > Date: Oct 2014
> 
> >From a email sent to me,
> "One of my friends works for an NGO and is based in rural parts of Asia
> and Latin America for about 10 months of the year. He told me that most
> of the machines were second-hand and had faulty DVD drives. Moreover DVD
> discs are prone to scratches and wear-and-tear. On the other hand USB
> flash drives are ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive. Even used
> machines have at least a USB port."
> 
> I have produced complete 32 & 64 bit installation sticks for wheezy
> (~43GB) and Jessie (~55GB) which fit nicely on a 64GB stick.  However,
> the stick is of limited use because the stick cannot be accessed after
> the initial installation which means that additional software cannot be
> installed.

I have a USB stick that is used for installing Wheezy and which is
recognised on reboot. Instead of writing DVD1 to the stick I do the
following:

1. Have a FAT16 partition spanning the whole stick. Format as vfat.

2. Install GRUB in the MBR and copy the hd-media vmlinuz and initrd.gz
   to /boot and write a grub.cfg to boot from them. Copy DVD1 to /.

3. Copy the files in /pool on DVD1 to /debian on the stick. Create a
   packages file in /debian. We now have a mirror which can be used
   during and after the install.

4. Install, preseeding with a late_command for tasks. A few lines of
   mine in that command are

     mkdir /target/media/usbmount; \
     mount --bind /hd-media /target/media/usbmount; \
     sed -i 's/^/#/' /target/etc/apt/sources.list; \
     echo "deb [ trusted=yes ] file:/media/usbmount/debian wheezy main" >> /target/etc/apt/sources.list

5. Install additional software after the install by mounting the mirror
   on /media/usbmount.

Regards,

Brian.