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Re: Installation tests with GRUB on GPT disks

On 05/16/2018 08:53 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

On 05/16/2018 08:15 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:

Unfortunately booting the CDROM kernel and initrd via GRUB2 over the network did not work as expected by me:

After the installer started it wants to load its components from the non-existing CDROM, of course... :-(

There is no command line switch for the installer (kernel) that will make it behave like a netboot installer, right?


This is expected. You cannot use the cdrom debian-installer initrd for netboot
and vice versa. If you want to perform a netboot, you have to use the initrd
for netboot which is inside the debian-installer-images tarball as found
on the FTP servers in the pool-sparc64/main/d/debian-installer subdirectory.


Ah, good to know.



Since the d-i current image is outdated, use the one from here:


https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/debian-cd/debian-installer-images_20171204_sparc64.tar.gz


Please note that even the "NETINST" images are still CD images. Real netboot
images just require a kernel and initrd. The netboot initrd contains the
necessary network drivers and is designed to fetch udebs over the internet.
I had a look at the netboot "boot.img". The problem is - or was - that I didn't know how to extract the initrd from this TILO image.
In the meantime I found a way to extract the initrd from the TILO image. But trying an installation with it and the CDROM kernel (which I assume is identical to the kernel inside of the TILO image) showed some issues (missing Debian ports keys, defaults to buster, debootstrap fails to install initramfs-tools, etc.) that prevented a successful installation.
We could start a separate thread for these issues and we should maybe also change from TILO image to just kernel and netboot initrd or only netboot initrd (using the CDROM kernel in addition), as we now know how to netboot these with GRUB. 

So for testing I again used the ISO.
BTW although this ISO ([1]) already has d-i/silo-installer removed, the d-i/grub-installer on it does not yet include the patch you committed on May 15th. But one can fix that during installation.
[1]: https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/debian-cd/debian-10.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso 

Frank
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