Re: Having problem with Debian's Installation Guide Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting

@Stephan Beck,

Sorry, English isnt good enough, may be it's hard to get what i really mean :(

If you really follow the installation guide
ch04s03.html.en#usb-copy-flexible, you have to create a syslinux.cfg
yourself, there is no existing syslinux.cfg (content),

There was no existing syslinux.cfg. I followed the instruction, I created the syslinux.cfg. I wrote these lines into syslinux.cfg :
1: default vmlinuz

2: append initrd=initrd.gz

I tried to boot the USB, and it complained about having a 'kernel panic - vfs unable to ... '

I then edit the syslinux.cfg, replaced them with these four lines:
1: default debi
2: label debi
3: kernel vmlinuz
4: append initrd=initrd.gz

and the USB disk booted normally, no complain, and proceed to the installation menu.

Doing it the flexible way, the content of the syslinux.cfg to be created
should be (it's from the stick I used for a real installation, so
priority=medium is optional) :

default vmlinuz initrd=initrd.gz priority=medium

After having debian installed on my machine, I formatted my USB disk, I haven't tried your suggestion, but it should work.

My purpose writing this is to confirm that those two lines from https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03.html.en#usb-copy-flexible didn't work out for me. The installation guide might need a tiny fix... (If I'm not wrong)

Debian Jessie itself uses syslinux version 6.03. Creating a USB boot disk using those two lines in syslinux.cfg will not work.

Refer to the official syslinux site http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Directives/append

Take the following simple configuration:
  DEFAULT mykernel
  APPEND root=/dev/sda2
Note that the APPEND line here is a global directive, as it is not part of any LABEL entry.
For Syslinux 4.xx and older, the above simple configuration works as (it used to be) expected.
Since version 5.00, the result for the above sample configuration is that the root=/dev/sda2 argument is not parsed, which will lead to unexpected results, most probably with some kind of failure to boot the OS. In other words, the global APPEND is ignored by the DEFAULT directive.

Regards,

Bill