I have a diskless machine and figured it would be quicker to get it running off a USB thumb drive than PXE boot. I'd appreciate any suggestions or advice.
I stuck Debian live on the thumb drive but discovered changes I made in that environment were not persistent. Ran the installer on the live CD and installed to the rest of the thumb drive. However, grub said it could not install to the drive (which, of course, was in use by the installer system). I tried chroot'ing into the new system from the live system. But, even after mounting /dev and others for the chroot, grub-install says root@debian:/# grub-install /dev/sda Installing for i386-pc platform. grub-install: warning: Attempting to install GRUB to a disk with multiple partition labels. This is not supported yet.. grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install. There might be two issues: one, accessing sda, and the second that I am using one big filesystem on top of LVM; there is no separate partition outside of lvm for grub. This was mostly an oversight, though I had hoped that current grub could cope. Because this was a live image the partition table is msdos. Which is maybe not so great for grub, which needs more room. The live image is about 1G and the thumb drive is 32G. Thanks for any help. Ross Boylan