Re: installing Debian
stoatspam@fastmail.fm wrote:
I am trying to install Debian on my 486. It has no bootable CD drive. I
was able to install it without any problems when I used the slink version
that came with this book Learning Debian Gnu/Linux.
If you have network capability on the box, I'd install Slink, then do a
dist-upgrade to Stable. Crossing over that many versions may or may not
work, but I'd give it a try.
Because that was so
old I got a new CD image. With the old one I only needed the rescue
floppy image. To get into the install program with the new CD I needed
the rescue and the root floppy images. There were some errors too, before
the install program loaded. It said "modprobe: modprobe: can´t open
dependencies file /lib/modules/2.2.20/modules.dep" about 20 or 40 times
I'm _fairly_ confident that this won't be a problem.
then it said it was starting something called "BusyBox"
I believe BusyBox is a single monolithic file that combines many of the
smaller and more useful utilities, such as cp, mv, rm, mkdir, etc. It's
roughly equivalent to the way MS-DOS had its "internal" commands, such
as del, copy, etc (as opposed to its "external" commands, such as print,
fdisk, format, etc) which were all bundled into COMMAND.COM.
then it said the
same thing as before about 20 or 40 more times. Then it said "EXT2-fs
warning: checktime reached running e2fsck is reccommended" then it says
"UNIX NET4.0" is starting. Then the install program starts. There aren´t
any problems with that, and I create and initialize my main and swap
partitions just fine.
You might want to reboot after partitioning, and before initializing, to
force a reread of the partition table.
Then it is time to "Install Kernel and Driver
Modules" so I do that and it automatically detects the stuff is on the CD
and then it says it is "extracting Rescue Floppy Image from mounted
medium" (I think). Then it says it is installing drivers and then it says
"Installation Error: There was a problem installing the Drivers from
/instmnt/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/current/drivers.tgz" so I press
continue and it takes me back to "Install Kernel and Driver Modules". I
do that again and it hangs on the part about the floppy image it passed
before. It says: "Floppy Error: The attempt to extract the Rescue Floppy
from the disk failed" and when I press continue it goes back to "Install
Kernel and Driver Modules" and when I do that it has the same floppy
error over and over again. I tried the load kernel modules from floppy
option but it couldn´t find them on the floppy. Maybe the CD is bad,
If your new CD is a burned copy (someone made it at home and gave it to
you), I can almost guarantee that the problem is your CD-ROM drive.
Older CD-ROM drives typically had a lot of trouble reading burned CDs.
See if you can find someone with a pressed CD that may have come with a
more recent book or something. Or alternatively, create installation
floppies ("no-o-o-o-o!"). Or leave a small partition on the hard drive,
and copy the installer files to that location and do a hard drive -based
install. Afterwards you can reclaim that partition as a /tmp partition
or something similar.
but
I´ve taken good care of it. The only idea I have about the problem is
that a book I have says that if you have too many cards in a system with
VLBus it won´t be good. I´ve got two VLBus cards (video, disk controller)
and a sound card, modem, and NIC, which I guess is a lot so maybe that´s
the problem. That is the only idea I have and I hope somebody can help
me.
Angh, prolly not. As mentioned above, I suspect you're using a burned CD
in an older CD-ROM drive.
Thanks, Nick
--
Kent West (westk@acu.edu)
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