Re: squeeze install: Gave up waiting for root devices
I found out by trial and error that, although directions don't mention
making the USB-key bootable, I must make its first partition bootable.
Now I can boot the installer. However, when it looks for the ISO,
rather than look for it on the USB-key (/dev/sdb) (or at least I
didn't catch it), it looks for an ISO in the partitions of my target
drive (/dev/sda). Not finding any, the installation fails with
message, "No kernel modules were found".
The most obvious problem would be that my installer and kernel
versions are incompatible. I rechecked, and made sure I got my debian
6.0 alpha1 installer from
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ and my initrd.gz and
vmlinuz files from
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/
. So I do have properly matched versions.
The problem seems to be that the installer looks for the ISO on my
target (ext3) HD instead of my (FAT) USB-key. While the failure
message is being displayed, I do Alt-F2 to go to a bash shell and do a
ls, it lists the directories on my target HD, sda rather than the
USB-key, sdb. Shouldn't the shell be looking at the USB-key?
When I issue the mount command, I find that my USB-key, /dev/sdb1, is
mounted on /hd-media type vfat. When I cd to /hdmedia, I find
debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso, initrd.gz, ldlinux.sys, vmlinuz, and
syslinux.cfg file, which has in it:
default vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.gz
So the USB-key is mounted, has the right versions of the files, the
syslinux.cfg file has the correct information. Why is the installer
then not picking up the ISO from the key instantly rather than search
for it on the target HD?
Haines Brown
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