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Re: Netinstall grief on iMac G5



On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 07:01:45PM +0930, Mike Hore wrote:
> I wrote:
> >I wrote:
> >>
> >>Now to work out what CD driver package I should be using...
> >I'm still stuck at this point.  My iMac G5 has its CD-ROM drive on the 
> >ATA bus.  What am I supposed to do when the installer asks me what 
> >driver to use?
> >
> >I really need some newbie-type step-by-step help on doing a netinstall 
> >-- like even when I get to the shell prompt, what do I do next to get, 
> >say, KDE installed?
> >The manual seems a bit unimformative.
> 
> I really need some help here.
> 
> The installer sets up my language, keyboard etc.  It then says it can't 
> detect a "common CD-ROM drive".  I have no idea why it's trying to do 
> this at this point, or why it can't detect the drive it's just booted 
> off.

Linux didn't load linux from the CD into RAM. The bootloader did. For
Linux to be able to see the cdrom, it needs the proper cdrom modules.

>  The manual doesn't mention this step, as far as I can tell.
> Anyway it asks me if I want to install a driver on a floppy (which of 
> course the iMac doesn't have), or do a netinstall.  Well of course I'm 
> TRYING to do a netinstall!!!

It was quite some time since I explored this, but I think the
netinstall flavour of debian-installer means: 

1. Boot the installer from cd (or usb, or whatever your installation medium is)
2. load packages in "base" from cd
3. load all other packages from internet.

For step 2 to work, the cdrom-module Linux needs to read from your
CD-device must be available in the initrd, which is loaded into RAM by
the bootloader.

So to solve the issue, find out what the driver is needed and file a
bug-report that the driver is not included in the initrd.

> It also says I can manually pick a driver from the /dev directory.  On 
> looking there, I don't see anything that looks like ATA. 

(re)post this message on debian-boot if you haven't already. This "pick a
driver from /dev" is news to me, can't help you with that one.

-- 
Hans Ekbrand (http://sociologi.cjb.net) <hans@sociologi.cjb.net>
A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
Q. Why is top posting bad?

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