My answers below. On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:11:35 +0200 Goswin von Brederlow <[email protected]> wrote:
> Félix Arreola Rodríguez <[email protected]> writes: > > > Oops, I forget CC the mailing list, Forwarding. > > > > El lun, 25-06-2012 a las 16:22 +0200, Matthias Richerzhagen > > escribió: > >> Hello, > >> > >> As i have no optical drive in my Computer and i didn't wanted to > >> invest time to get a boot USB stick running i decided to use the > >> debian installer from goodby-microsoft. > >> The first problem i encountered was, that the firmware for my > >> ethernet card was not supplied with the installer, so i took a USB > >> stick and copied the firmware files. > > > > The Debian Installer can't have firmware files (or at least, the > > non-free ones), this because it violates the DFSG [1] > > > >> That first of course didn't work, > >> because it was NTFS formatted. But that was pretty obvious, so i > >> could resolve that easily. (But this disability to read NTFS > >> should be noted somewhere inside the installer itself) > > > > The NTFS filesystem is privative, and is hardly usable and private > > again, this is why is not supported in the d-i. > > As my opinion, NTFS is a poor choice for a USB stick. > > NTFS-3g fuse filesystem works just fine. There is no reason not to > include that in d-i. NTFS might be a poor choice for a USB stick but > hardly an uncommon one. I would like a note on the screen, that says "insert your removable media now", that informs me about "Supported file systems are: ..." > >> After the installer had loaded its components from the internet i > >> re-sized a partition on my hard drive (actually my Windows boot > >> partition) to have some space for Debian and installed Debian > >> there. The next step was to install GRUB. That was the first step > >> that failed, with an error message: "grub-install /dev/sda" > >> failed. BUT /dev/sda is the USB device i loaded the firmware for my > >> ethernet card from! (like i could see from the partition manager) > > Did you load the firmware from sda itself or a partition of sda? > In the later case grub should have worked and it would be interesting > to find out why it didn't. well. /dev/sda is the device for my usbstick, and it actually has only one fat16-partition on it, which the firmware is copied to. (That's what it looked like in the partition-manager) > > The actual squeeze installer ask if is ok installing grub > > on /dev/sda, if you choice no, you can specify other device. If > > this was no the case, maybe the d-i from goodbye-microsft is a > > little out of date. > > Just some background information here. The order in which devices > appear is somewhat random, it varies between different systems and > can even change on every boot. Also asking the bios for the boot > order, i.e. which device it boots from, is highly unreliable. > > So unless you have only one "harddisk" it becomes quite hard, if not > impossible in general, to find the right device to install grub > to. Well, D-I (or rather grub-common I think) doesn't try anything > fancy and instead asks you about it. Haven't seen that question. It asks me if I want it installed to the MBR, which for me sounded right (as i always did it like that) and grub had discovered all my other operating systems (only the broken windows 7). Was that the mistake i made? > >> But installing LILO worked fine. > >> Finishing installation - rebooting - Kernel Panic. > >> stuck at initrd shell(?) couldt not find a kernel to load? > >> something like that. > >> "Oh damn, but i still have my Windows System" > >> But windows is stuck at the boot screen and says, that the > >> partition is corrupted and that it cannot fix that. > >> > >> So in short: > >> The debian installer wanted to install grub on my usb > >> stick /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb (hard drive) > >> The partition re-size destroyed my windows boot partition (Well i > >> cannot really blame you for that, because of the big warning about > >> POSSIBLE data loss, but it worked for me on another system without > >> the installer several times pretty well, so i was not worried :/) > > > > Always there will be problems with NTFS partitions, in this case > > blame the fragmentation in NTFS. You should always defrag the > > partition before re-sizing it. *Other* option is let windows doing > > the resizing thing, he can't kill him self (Or he could?). > > > >> > >> Now i got a debian install usbstick, which worked fine out of the > >> box, but i want to share my experiences with you and have the > >> hope, that nobody has to make these experiences again. > > Did it work because now the usb stick ended up as /dev/sdb and > installing grub on the real harddisk worked? Or did it manage to make > your USB stick bootable? It worked, because my usb stick ended up as /dev/sd[^a]. > > Maybe this supports my theory of the d-i out of date. > > Would be nice to have version information of the installer to be > certain. I still can boot the installer, so i may provide you with that information, if you can tell me where to look. Greetings Matthias -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
