Re: Waking from the Dead

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

> 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.

  Hi --

  The instructions I used don't seem to have that requirement -- you just
need "dd", which Macs can do, I think.

  According to my (slightly dated, and possibly fragmentary) notes, 
I got "boot.img.gz" from:

<ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-
i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz>

(NB 32-bit, and probably was Lenny when I did this, but others are
supposed to work...)

  Then, plug in your USB device, do "zcat /path/to/boot.img.gz > /dev/sd<x>"
(substitute OS-specific nomenclature for /dev/sd<x>), mount /dev/sdx (it will
have a bootable FAT32 file-system), and copy the ISO of your choice to the
root of the device.

  Then unmount, and boot your installation target system from it.

  I have a dim recollection that the name of the ISO file mattered,
and had to match a config entry on the USB device somewhere, but my
notes, alas, don't cover that case.

  Also, the ISO can't be too big -- you'll want the net-install ISO
for this.

				-- A.
--
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net