Re: Debian live installer problems

On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 12:38 PM, Mario Castelán Castro <marioxcc.MT@yandex.com> wrote:

On 2017-08-20 09:59 -0600 Arjun Krishnan <arjunkc@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The installer needs to find its own ISO image. The non-live installer
>> will only search by default in the root directories of your
>> file-systems, but not in the subdirectories. Maybe this is the case
>> with the live installer as well. Try putting the ISO image in the root
>> directory (“/”).
>It doesn't seem to be finding the iso even after moving to the root
>directory in the usb drive.
>Which iso did you use? I used the netinst iso, and the hd-media kernel and
>initrd, both of which didnt
>work.

I did use an iso of the same release, but I guess it's not so straightforward for me for the following reason:

I have an efi partition on my usb drive, which loads grub. This setup allows me to just add isos to the usb drive

and have grub chainload the kernel and initrd from the iso. This works on mint, ubuntu, arch, etc.

Now grub.cfg has entries that look like this, where debian-squeeze.iso is on the root directory of the usb drive.

menuentry 'debian netinst' {

set iso='debian-squeeze.iso'

loopback loop $iso

linux (loop)/install.amd/vmlinuz findiso=$iso

initrd (loop)/install.amd/initrd.gz

}

So thinking I had the wrong initrd like you suggested, I copied the initrd and vmlinuz to the root partition of the usb, and changed these to

menuentry 'debian netinst' {

set iso='debian-squeeze.iso'

linux /vmlinuz-hd-image findiso=$iso

initrd /initrd-hd-image.gz

}

The iso happens to be in the root partition of the drive, so are the initrd and vmlinuz. They're just being loaded weirdly, I suppose.

I used the ISO of the first non-live DVD. Make sure you use an ISO of the
same release than the initrd.gz and vmlinuz.

I did ensure this.

If you want to do a net install, you do not need any ISO. As the Debian
installation manual (which you should have at least glanced over) says:

I did read over it, but it doesn't seem to cover my specific situation, or at least I

ve not been able to figure it out.

“If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download
everything over the network, you should download the
netboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel
netboot/debian-installer/amd64/linux. This will allow you to repartition
the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so
with care.”

To download and verify the initrd.gz and vmlinuz, use my already given
instructions (I have *not* verified this variation), except that in step
(1) substitute the URIs with
<http://ftp.mx.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/installer-amd64/20170615+deb9u1/images/netboot/gtk/debian-installer/amd64/linux>
and
<http://ftp.mx.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/installer-amd64/20170615+deb9u1/images/netboot/gtk/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz>
and in step (3), substitute the command given with:

“sed -nE
'/netboot\/gtk\/debian-installer\/amd64\/(initrd.gz|linux)$/{s/^([[:xdigit:]]*).*\/([^/]*)$/\1
\2/;p}' SHA256SUMS | sha256 --strict -c”.

-----
Another way, IIRC, is that you can instead extract the initrd.gz and
vmlinuz from the netinstall ISO (these also do not need the ISO image,
not even the netboot one, again IIRC). I think I did this with Debian 8,
but I do not remember the details.