Re: Installing Debian from USB pen drive

["Santanu Chatterjee" <thisissantanu@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Adrian Levi <adrian.levi@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/02/2008, Santanu Chatterjee <thisissantanu@gmail.com> wrote:
....
>  >  When I try to boot from the pendrive, it boots just fine, and the installer
>  >  starts OK. But then, it cannot find the cdrom. Thats OK, because there
>  >  is no cdrom in the drive. But I want it to install from the 'netinst.iso' image.
>  >  But I can't find a way to make it do the install from the iso image.
>  >
>  >  Can anyone tell me how to make the installer install from the iso image?
>
> Have you tried mounting the image from the console (in the installer)
>  and then pointing the installer to the local repository?

Yes. I tried that too, but somehow I could not loop mount, and the loop.ko
module could not be found anywhere in /lib/modules.
So, to workaround this problem, I made a directory in the
USB pendrive (from my working Linux PC) and copied the full contents
of the iso image into this directory. Then I tried booting again, but
still the installer is trying to find a cdrom drive and failing.

Now, you said "pointing the installer to the local repository". How exactly
is this done? When the cdrom detection failed, at a console, I found
a directory named '/cdrom' already created (empty). I linked this directory
so that it pointed to the iso contents in my pendrive. Then I attempted
to rerun the earlier step by selecting the option 'install from installer cdrom'
(the wordings might be a bit off but this is the option just next to the
'detect installer cdrom' option). But I am still getting the same error.

Is there any particular way to 'point the installer' to the installer cdrom
contents?

Regards,
Santanu