Re: Debian live installer problems

My guess is that you are not following the instructions in the Debian
installation guide complemented by my commentary. You seem to have your own
idea of how to do things, which to me appears to be your own wild guess.

This is not the case. There's no need to be so negative and disrespectful, Mario, you're not Linus Torvalds.

We're all only trying to learn here. However, I appreciate the time you took to try and help.

I finally got the debian installer to work, and here is how. I wanted an easy-to-maintain usb stick that would install all of the different linux distributions (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multiboot_USB_drive). The problem was that my usb stick was running off

an efi grub. It had two partitions, one efi containing the grub shim, and one ext4. I have a bunch of different linux isos with different distributions distributions loaded in the ext4 partition, and one single grub.cfg file that loads the installers from these isos. The debian installer was the only one giving me trouble. It turned out that the debian installer needed an extra grub needed a module called `efi_gop` to be loaded. I don't know what it does, and would appreciate any information.

The following grub2 entry boots the debian net installer. In this case, I'd copied the hd-image initrd and vmlinuz on to the ext4 partition as

stated in the debian install guide.

menuentry 'debian stretch 9.1 netinst' {
insmod efi_gop
search --no-floppy --set=root --fs-uuid e84f9c3d-3021-45b0-b2c6-da7852c3c151 --hint hd0,gpt2
linux /vmlinuz vga=788 --- quiet
initrd /initrd.gz
}

Once the installer loaded, it searched for isos on the usb stick and loaded the packages it needed from there.

In fact, it is not necessary to get the initrd and kernel from the hd-image folder *at all*, and the following menuentry works just as well.

menuentry '[loopback]debian stretch 9.1 xfce-cd config' {
insmod efi_gop
# this is the path to the ext4 partition on the usb drive
set imgdevpath="/dev/disk/by-uuid/e84f9c3d-3021-45b0-b2c6-da7852c3c151"
set isofile='/boot/iso/debian-9.1.0-amd64-xfce-CD-1.iso'
loopback loop $isofile
linux (loop)/install.amd/gtk/vmlinuz desktop=xfce fromiso=${imgdevpath}/${isofile}
initrd (loop)/install.amd/gtk/initrd.gz
}

Notice here that grub2 is loading the ramdisk and linux kernel that reside on the iso. If I removed the `insmod efi_gop` statement from either of these, the installer would fail to boot.

What I don't understand is why the efi_gop module is needed for the Debian installer, but not for the Debian live cd.