Re: [Debian 8.0 Installation] Firmware files on USB stick with debian iso
Quoting Avinash Sonawane (rootkea@gmail.com):
> Finally I went ahead without the firmware files and installed the
> Debian 8.0. And now it's working just fine! Perhaps due to the fact
> that I selected the mirror and fetched packages from Internet (using
> Ethernet) during installation.
>
> My advice will be : Do not try to use firmware files at the time of
> installation.
I think you need to qualify that advice.
> Though you'll follow the official Debian Installation Guide, "loading
> firmware at the time of install" most probably not gonna work. First
> you'll be posed with GPT error (with Gparted and Disks applications)
> when you'll try to create a new FAT partition (as suggested in
> Installation Guide). Then you'll think to use fdisk command line
> utility to make you way and though you'll be able to create the
> partition using fdisk, you'll be posed with missing kernel modules
> message during installation and thus will leave you no choice but to
> continue install *without* loading the firmware files.
If you copy the netinst iso file to a stick following method 4.3.1, I
would agree that adding a third partition can be tricky. However,
fdisk does the job because it allows you to set the start of the
partition and defaults to a sensible number.
It seems from what you've written here that you may have already
damaged the existing partitions before you thought to use fdisk. This
may be the cause of your "missing kernel modules".
However, the firmware installation still seems to fail because d-i
tries to mount /dev/sdX and finds it busy (not surprisingly since
/dev/sdX1 is the mounted CD image of the installation system).
It doesn't then try mounting /dev/sdXN, N=2,3,...
OTOH using a second USB stick works, and I have also verified that
using an SD card works too which can be useful on a laptop. I hadn't
tried that before. So it's just the combined installation/firmare on a
single stick that fails. Just make sure the firmware files are at the
top-level, not inside zip/deb files.
On yet another hand, if the non-free firmware is in the iso that's
further down https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/debian-installer/
by the red cross, then that works ok.
> In short though official Debian Installation Guide discusses about
> loading the firmware files alongside the Debian installation image on
> a single USB stick, the mechanism is most probably screwed up.
Not if you use the one method that works ok: 4.3.2.
This is the method that unpacks hd-media/boot.img.gz
where it does help to know that that is downloadable from
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
as outlined in https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/04/msg01768.html
The limitation is that the iso must fit in the 1GB partition so it's
best suited to netinst rather than DVDs.
(My next challenge is installing on a machine that requires a driver
in ndiswrapper.)
Cheers,
David.
Reply to: