Re: Installing Debian on a Minnowboard Turbot with installer on USB stick?
Hi,
Rick Thomas wrote:
> Instead, I used
> firmware-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso
> to avoid any possible alpha/testing anomalies.
Normally i'd say that there is no decisive difference to expect.
In any case copying a "netinst" ISO is much faster than a "DVD-1".
> When I tried part (a) — just a simple dd — with
> debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso, the minnowboard immediately recognized it as
> bootable and presented it as part of the EFI menu labeled “EFI USB Device”.
Normally this difference should not appear. Very strange.
But we can now classify the demand for GPT on
https://minnowboard.org/tutorials/best-practice-boot-media-selection
as spin-off of the usual rumor that EFI needs GPT.
> it booted without incident and ran the installer.
> When it came to the part where it looks for a CD, it easily found the USB
> stick
This was expectable. As long as the ISO is marked as partition, the
script in the initrd should find the device.
> tried
> part (a) with “firmware-buster-DI-alpha2-amd64-DVD-1.iso”. And guess what!
> That worked too, just the same as the other two.
Hrmpf. At least above "normally"s are not generally put in doubt.
It would be another riddle if one ISO would fail reproducibly while
the other succedds reproducibly.
Maybe you changed a setting in the firwmware ?
> or there’s something flakey about the USB ports on this device
But why did the manual start of “fs0:\efi\boot\bootx64.efi” ran the
boot loader, loaded the kernel, and came far enough to run into the
software shortcomming of device detection ?
> In any case, I apologize for all the noise.
I doubt that this was a hallucination.
If not the hardware (stick and port) makes itself a suspect by failing
in normal operation, then i'd bet on the firmware's settings.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Thomas, If you would like to follow up on the inability of the installer to
> recognize itself as a suitable installation CD
I believe to understand that problem. Let's see whether debian-cd will
find a time slot to discuss it and whether trying the devices found by
"list-devices disk" (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc on my machine) is
harmless enough.
It would be interesting to study the history of cdrom-detect.postinst
(package "cdrom-detect", 1600+ commits in
https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/cdrom-detect/commits/master).
cdrom-detect/blame brings me to some forth and back, which probably
does not tell the reason for the decision not to look for "disk".
I'd need a comfortable method to look at the revison _before_ a commit
in order to get the next older blaming.
Or a method to see only commits which affect the interesting code parts
devices="$(list-devices cd; list-devices maybe-usb-floppy)"
and
devices="$(list-devices usb-partition)"
...
if try_mount $device $CDFS; then
Any GitLab experts here who could help me navigate ?
Or git experts who can augment my knowledge beyond "clone", "add",
"commit", and "push", so that i can inspect a clone locally ?
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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