On 2022-09-24 13:52, Dan Ritter wrote:
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?
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.
Proceeding, the installer couldn't establish a connection to the web.
What network hardware do you have? Wired or wireless?
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.
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-
