On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Chris Brennan
<xaero@xaerolimit.net> wrote:
This just got harder.
I'm trying to just do a reinstall but I only have a macbook to work from.
And the installation media can only be a USB drive.
I am having all kinds of trouble getting an ISO image onto the USB that will work.
I can 'cat debian.iso > /dev/disk1s1' well enough.
And the machine will recognize the disk at start up, but it never sees it as a bootable device and just hangs.
Many of the other instructions are assuming you have a working linux box, which I don't. The files/packages I need to download to build a bootable image I don't have and I can not get either -- apt-get is locked up on dependencies that I'm unable to resolve.
First: when I download a ISO for the Debian netinst image it's reported as 'unable to open' on mac.
"no mountable file systems" is the exact error.
Don't top post. Don't use cat either, try dd if=/image.iso of=/disk1s1. You will need to first turn the boot magic-bit on, w/ a/ sysctl cmd (I know it works in *bsd, not sure about OS X.
Take the top posting up with Google. I'll try to remember. Even though it's lame, top posting seems to be pretty common.
I can get the .iso loaded from a linux box via 'cat' That is about the only thing that works with my linux box right now.
Once i get that part done I have a directory of files on my USB image, but now the "stupid" machine won't recognize it as a bootable device. As for your sysctl cmd -- I have not a clue of how this fits in with anything at sysctl reads system variables and doesn't seem to have much about it setting magic bits. Is there something similar to this on a linux platform?