On 2022-09-24 13:52, Dan Ritter wrote:
When I tried to bypass partitioning. As I said, the disk was already partitioned and formatted and had a working copy of Debian 9 on it, so my thought was to just zero out the existing partitions, which was offered, and then proceed to install, but the the installer refused to let me proceed. It seemed to feel the need to create partitions not reuse them. The final partitioning screen showed the partitions marked 'K' (keep) and I couldn't explain to the installer that they were free to use.Ray Andrews wrote: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'.You are lacking vital information to pass on to us here: what necessary step was not completed?
Wired. Pretty basic. As I said, the 'advanced' installer had no trouble whatsoever. The only thing I interacted with was setting the delay time to ten seconds from the IIRC default of three seconds. Seems to me the 'basic' installer could/should be able to handle that.Proceeding, the installer couldn't establish a connection to the web.What network hardware do you have? Wired or wireless?
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.The normal installer is the advanced installer but it pre-answers a lot of questions with the most common answers.
Sure, and it was good enough for me, except that it wouldn't connect to the internet as I just mentioned.
Why would the installer trash the MBR on a disk that was not involved? Why couldn't I use existing, functioning ext4 partitions?You can. Somewhere in the missing error messages are the clues.
It could be that I just wasn't interacting with it properly. If there was a log or something I'd be happy to attach another disk to the machine and try again and send you the results. As long as you guys are interested I'll do anything to help.
Thanks Dan
-dsr-