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 at
https://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