Re: Installation instructions.
On Thu, 3 Dec 2020 at 07:54, <peter@easthope.ca> wrote:
> > > https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s01.en.html#boot-initrd
> > Quoting paragraphs 2 and 3 from your link above ...
> > Alternatively, if you intend to keep an existing partition on the hard
> > drive unchanged during the install, you can download the
> > hd-media/initrd.gz file and its kernel, as well as copy a CD (or DVD)
> > iso to the drive (make sure the file is named ending in .iso). The
> > installer can then boot from the drive and install from the CD/DVD
> > image, without needing the network.
> > 1) Which of the above are you attempting? Paragraph 2 or paragraph 3?
> 3.
Ok great. Thanks for putting a decent effort into your reply, it helps greatly
to know better the situation we are responding to :)
Looking at your method, it looks quite misguided and over complicated,
perhaps you are working from obsolete information sources. The current
method is much easier.
The starting point is that you have chosen
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-10.6.0-i386-netinst.iso
(current, stable, i386)
Per the "paragraph 3" I mentioned previously and quoted at the top
of this message, the required vmlinuz and initrd.gz for (current, stable, i386)
can be downloaded from:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/
These are different to the ones inside the iso (because those don't
support the installation method that you have chosen).
Now we have obtained the 3 files required for installation, we can
next prepare the target HDD on your workstation. The only necessary
steps are to make the target HDD bootable with at least one ext4
partition containing our 3 files. Let's name that parition INSTLR as
you did. Next do these steps ...
> Mount INSTLR at /mnt/.
> mount /dev/sdx4 /mnt/ # x represents the actual drive letter. Eg. "c".
> Make a grub directory.
> mkdir /mnt/grub
> Install grub on the target HDD.
> grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdx
> open /mnt/grub/grub.cfg with an editor. If the following stanza is
> not present, add it. Note that we have the files at /, not at
> /boot/newinstall/ as the example.
> menuentry 'CDless CD install' {
> insmod part_msdos
> insmod ext2
> set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
> linux /vmlinuz
> initrd /initrd.gz
> }
Next copy our 3 files from above (vmlinuz, intird.gz, and iso)
to the target HDD.
cp <the files> /mnt
Now put the target HDD into the target machine, boot it, and run the
installer. It can do the rest of the partitioning you want, there's no
need to use gparted beforehand although that could work as an
alternative method, it's not required.
That should work, let us know if it doesn't.
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