feedback on install of bullseye
To whom might read this. I can't boil this down to a formal bug report
but for what it's worth:
BULLSEYE INSTALL, 2022-09-23:
Decided to do a virgin install of bullseye to my /dev/sdb while keeping
/dev/sda devoted to Stretch. Got the installer onto a USB stick, and
proceeding normally. The 'normal' install (sorry, I forget the exact
name) ... I get as far as partitioning and although the disk (sdb) is
already partitioned and formatted and working fine, it seemed to be
impossible to just leave things as they were and install to the existing
partitions, it kept complaining that a necessary step was not completed.
Erasing the partitions (overwrite with zeros) didn't help. I couldn't
figure out how to make it work so backed up and selected 'use whole disk'.
Proceeding, the installer couldn't establish a connection to the web. I
aborted the install since I couldn't go forward anyway. Boot to sda and
... the installer had trashed the MBR of *both* disks and the machine
was unbootable. I attached another backup disk, booted to that, mounted
my Stretch partitions on sda, reran LILO, and that was fine, I could
boot Stretch. But the installer also trashed the swap partition on sda
-- I had to run mkswap. But no permanent damage was done.
Trying again, I disconnected sda to keep it from getting mauled a second
time and proceeded with the 'advanced' installer, again selecting 'use
entire disk', this time the installer took the extra steps to get the
network up and running and the install completed quite smoothly.
Shouldn't the 'normal' install do whatever is needed to get the network
running? the advanced install had no problem there, I didn't have to
intervene it just got it done.
Why would the installer trash the MBR on a disk that was not involved?
Why couldn't I use existing, functioning ext4 partitions?
If one does have to abort, wouldn't it be better if no changes at all
were made to anything? Why have a trashed system even when one had to
abort? In other words, why not check that the network is available
*before* trashing the MBR of both disks and the partition table of sdb
and the swap partition of the other disk?
... just in case anyone is interested.
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