Re: Booting Debian 10 installer ISO from USB
On Thu 21 Nov 2019 at 12:08:05 -0600, prueba@finsakxim.com.mx wrote:
> I think I sorted out part of my problem.
> For those who I made them lost, a summary of what I'm trying to do.
>
> I'm trying to boot Debian 10 via Grub's loopback device, in order to make a
> multiboot USB with several Linux distros by copying just the ISOs.
>
> I already read Debian installer CD has an initrd with no iso-scan package,
> so won't work out of the box and must use hd-media initrd and vmlinuz to
> make it work.
>
> So I downloaded, renamed, and placed them in same directory as Debian
> installer ISO, in the USB partition. Then created grub.cfg config in USB:
>
> iso_path=/boot/iso/debian-10.2.0-amd64-xfce-CD-1.iso
> export iso_path
> search --set=root --file "$iso_path"
> loopback loop "$iso_path"
> menuentry "Graphical install" {
> bootoptions="iso-scan/filename=$iso_path desktop=xfce vga=788 --- quiet"
> linux /boot/iso/DebianVmlinuz $bootoptions
> initrd /boot/iso/debianGtkInitrd.gz
> }
>
> Then tested booting from USB, and the graphical installer does start, but
> after selecting language, locale and keyboard, I got this message:
> "The quick scan for installer ISO images, which looks only in common places,
> did not find an installer ISO image. It's possible that a more thorough
> search will find the ISO image, but it may take a long time. Do you wish to
> do a full scan?"
>
> Now, my recent problem was that even by answering yes, it didn't find the
> installer ISO which is right there in the USB.
> How sorted? It turned people here were right: I needed to update both initrd
> and installer ISO, since version 10.2 was released just 5 days ago...
>
> Having done this I retried. Still get the above message, but now thorough
> search is able to find and use the installer ISO.
>
> Now, my last issue is: quick scan always fails, looking only in "common
> places". So perhaps the location in the USB sdb3/boot/isos is not considered
> a "common place" and thus only full search can find it here. Can this
> behavior be changed?
> Maybe somehow telling quick scan to search in custom directories in
> grub.cfg?
My first point is that you are having the installer mount and search
every partition to find an ISO. This is time consuming.
The second point is that an ISO on another partition might be found
and used. What happens if it is a jessie ISO?
Why not label the partition on the USB drive and use the boot option
shared/enter_device=/dev/disk/by-label/<LABEL>
I would also put the ISO in / or /iso.
> For this matter, why isn't iso-scan/filename actually working?
You need to sort out the above first before proceeding with this.
--
Brian.
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