Bug#740503: debian-installer: check-missing-firmware does not work with a USB drive that contains a partition table
Hello,
I was trying to load the firmware during the debian-installer and I was
just getting prompted over and over again for the firmware without success.
Hardware: The device is a Samsung NP530U4B-S02 laptop with the Intel®
Centrino® Advanced-N 6230 802.11a/b/g/n .
Firmware: The necessary files that are requested byy the installer are
"iwlwifi-6000g2b-5.ucode" and "iwlwifi-6000g2b-6.ucode".
Setup: I downloaded a Debian netinstall iso (version 7.8.0 on the
23/02/2015) for my architecture from the official Debian website. I
created the install media on a usb flash drive with the "dd" command
like I do usually with GNU/Linux distributions. On another usb flash
drive formatted both as fat16 and fat32 with GParted using an msdos
partition scheme (as suggested per
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch06s04.html.en) I tried on
different occasions to used the ".ucode" firmware files on the root
directory of the usb flash drive and on a "/firmware" directory (on the
secondary flash drive) as well as both at the same time.
If I opened another tty, there were a few entries in dmesg, which read
"iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: no suitable firmware found" and other lines with
similar content.
I knew that this firmware works, because I have had to install it in the
past, but I used to have an ethernet link during install or a complete iso.
Lastly, I tried loading the firmware files manually, by copying the two
".ucode" files to /lib/firmware (I had to create this directory
manually) on a separate tty and then attempting to have the installer
search for the drivers and I was met with success. The wireless networks
were found and I was able to input my password, but I just got
redirected to the wireless network list without an error message. Note:
when the I used the method described by Chris Bainbridge
<chris.bainbridge@gmail.com>, the installer would show a window titled
something like "attempting to exchange keys with the network device",
before connecting successfully, which wasn't the case for the manual
loading of firmware.
Note2: After loading the firmware manually during the installer, a
message shows up in dmesg with the appropriate time stamp:
"ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready" and on /var/log/syslog,
for every entry that reads "authenticate with <router_mac_address>"
there is an entry "deauthenticating from <router_mac_address> by local
machine (reason=3)", when I tried to connect to my wireless network.
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