Re: Debian live installer problems

[Arjun Krishnan <arjunkc@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> wrote:

Le 20/08/2017 à 19:53, Mario Castelán Castro a écrit :

On 2017-08-20 13:36 -0400 Arjun Krishnan <arjunkc@gmail.com> wrote:

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

*Which* “initrd”? There are many of them. The ones *inside* the ISO image
does not work for loading the ISO image from an existing partition.

If you want to load the ISO image from an existing partition, you must use
the hd-media ones, which I have described already.

Also, IIRC, the ISO file must be on a FAT filesystem, because at that stage the installer can only mount FAT or ISO9660.

 

Oh! This does make a difference, because all my linux isos were on an ext4 filesystem. But so are the kernel and the initrd.

Do you know why the debian installer fails to support this, but the debian live cd and other ubuntu installers all manage to boot off the iso? To elaborate, why does loading the iso as a loop device, and then loading the kernel and initrd off of that work for the debian live cd, but not for the debian installer?

It is not clear to me what the current problem is.

 

Let me try to clarify the problem.

1. I have a usb stick that has an efi partition and a normal ext4 partition. The efi partition contains the grub efi shim. The normal ext4 partition contains grub, grub.cfg and several 

    linux isos. 

2. I've tried loading linux and initrd using grub: mount the iso as a loopdevice, then boot off the kernel and initrd in on the iso. The livecd works when loaded this way, but the netinst cd does not. 

3. As Mario suggested, I downloaded the *stretch* hd-image initrd and linux. I put them all (linux, initrd, iso) in the root partition of the ext4 partition, and had grub load the kernel and the initrd.

It loads the kernel (I think) and then it hangs. 

 

Neither to me. From the first post I understood that the boot process failed after loading the kernel, i.e. before loading the initrd and running the kernel, so whether the initrd could find the ISO file was irrelevant.

I don't know where in the process it fails. It says "failed to find video mode" and hangs.

The use case in the debian installation manual does appear to cover my use case. But perhaps it doesn't work because it can only load a FAT filesystem?