Debian install fails utterly
I have been trying to install Debian slink for about 3 working days now,
and it will not happen. First off, let me say that I am new to Debian,
but not to linux. I have been using it since 1991, so it's not a total
newbie mistake, but it may be a Debian newbie mistake.
I tried to boot off of the CDROM. The kernel hangs after it loads the
driver for my SCSI adapter (on-board AIC7890). I found some documentation
saying that the SCSI adapter can cause problems, but that someone (adric?)
had created some boot floppies that solved the problem. I d/l'ed those
and booted using them with the same hang. So I tried botting off of the
second CDROM, the 'tecra' one, and it did not hang on the kernel boot, but
it did panic because it evidently didn't know where to find the root
filesystem. Then I tried creating a new boot floppy with a new kernel
that didn't have support for my SCSI adapter at all (as it will not be
used at all -- don't ask, it's another long story). While it booted okay,
it also did not know where to find the root. I finally figured (not that
it's documented anywhere that I can find) that I needed to boot via floppy
with the 'ramdisk' method and that the root is in root.bin. Now I'm
actually up to a point that looks like it's trying to install. I go
through some stuff that looks okay until I get to a point where it's
looking for resc1440-2.2.6.bin (2.2.6 is the kernel I compiled). It can't
find it of course, and there appears to be no way to tell it to look for
something else. And I can't get any farther. Then I have the idea to
boot off of the 'tecra', but do a 'ramdisk' boot and have it load the root
off of the floppy. This seems to boot fine until it tries to find the
rescue disk again. This time it looks for a file that seems sane, but it
can't find it, so I umount the tecra CDROM and mount the standard one.
Then it seems able to find the disk image and everything goes okay until
reboot, at which point it tries to boot off of that original kernel that
hangs at the SCSI driver.
At this point, I am ready to jump up and down on the install media, the
motherboard with the SCSI adapter that I didn't want (again, don't ask),
the vendor that sold it to me, my coworkers, the debian.org website,
RedHat (just for laughs), both Deb and Ian, Adaptec, whoever "wrote" the
"Install Guide" my mother; really, just about everybody in sight.
I know I'm close to being in danger of offending everyone on this mailing
list, but at this point, I'm real close to telling everyone I know that
Debian is a true POS and to avoid it at all costs. I would really like to
be able to avoid that. It's as if the folks making the distro decided
that if you couldn't boot off of the CDROM without any additional options
then they really didn't want your business. Try following the
instructions for booting off of a floppy. It doesn't work. All it says
is that you need to boot off of the Resuce Floppy (6.2). Try to find a
reference to inserting the CDROM or an additional floppy or anything. I
certainly couldn't. If I was installing Slackware, for instance, I would
have tried to boot off of the CDROM, it would have hung up, and I would
then have created two floppy disks, a boot and a root, and booted off of
them, with all defaults accepted. I know that this works fine because I
did it on this machine just to make sure that there wasn't a hardware
problem.
Anyway, now that I've come as close as humanly possible to creating pure
flamebait, would someone PLEASE tell me that "you're a complete idiot and
you're going about it completely wrong and <this> is what you're supposed
to be doing, you annoying fool." Derision would be fine if I could just
get this f**ker installed.
-Bitt
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