On Thu, 2 Feb 2017, Richard Owlett wrote:
On 02/01/2017 02:50 AM, David Griffith wrote:I used to be able to make a writable USB thumbdrive installer > by following the directions found athttps://hyper.to/blog/link/debian-installer-on-a-usb-key/, altering the name of the release and device. Now I can't get > it to work. [*SNIP* details]I've snipped the details as I suspect the various readers have subconsciously used those details to say your goals/motivations are _identical_ to theirs.Following this thread I _read into_ your posts some {mutually contradictory} things I've tried to do with various levels of success.Once it's prepared, for what do you use it? What problem did using a USB stick for the above purpose solve? With what versions of Debian were you successful?I worded those questions to keep out as many of my preconceptions out as possible.
My intent is to have a USB installer flash drive to which I can add a preseed.cfg file, non-free firmware packages, and other stuff I like to add to a fresh machine.
It turned out that the problem was a change in syslinux's behavior that was documented for Stretch's install instructions[1], but not for Jessie[2]. It boiled down to the grammar of the syslinux.cfg file. For instance, this is the old way:
default vmlinuz append initrd=initrd.gz This is the new way: default vmlinuz initrd=initrd.gz See also: https://bugs.debian.org/803267 https://bugs.debian.org/853918 https://bugs.debian.org/853965 Footnotes: [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/amd64/ch04s03.html.en [2] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03.html.en -- David Griffith dave@661.org A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?