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Installing Debian 9 from live image

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#31 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Going back to the OP for a second:
Huecuva wrote:the installer doesn't mount the SD card and doesn't even detect it as being present
I forgot to check: how *exactly* did you transfer the ISO image to the installation medium?

The "mounting problem" is usually caused by incorrect transfer — were you using an obsolete tool such as unetbootin?

Rufus also has trouble with Debian images, if the posts on these boards are anything to go by.
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#32 Post by Huecuva »

Alright, so there's a pretty long list of stuff in the log terminal. I'm not sure what's relevant and what isn't but it's on a different machine than the one I'm using to post this so I'm not sure how to go about getting it all into this post without simply typing it all out. Is there some way to screenshot this terminal or export it to a file? if I export it to a file, where would this file be stored, since the OS isn't even installed?

If all else fails, I can just take a picture of the screen (gotta love smartphones) and attach it, I guess.

As for how I transferred the ISO to the USB stick, I used the USB Image Writer in Linux Mint 18.3 MATE. Which is on the machine I'm currently using to post this.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#33 Post by p.H »

Sometimes the useful information in the log is obvious. Sometimes it is not...
The full installation log file is in /var/log/ (syslog or something). Until the successful end of the installation is remains in volatile memory and is lost on shutdown.
You can switch to an ash shell in console tty2 or tty3 and copy it on a manually mounted USB drive.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#34 Post by Huecuva »

I'm not exceptionally familiar with the linux terminal so maybe I'm doing this wrong, but it doesn't look like I have permission to copy the log file.

I put in a small, empty USB stick which became sde, according to fdisk -l. I mounted /dev/sde/ to /mnt/ like so:

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mount /dev/sde/ /mnt/
It made no response. I assumed it was mounted. I then tried to copy the entire directory of /var/log/ to the USB, as follows:

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cp /var/log/ /mnt/
to which it responds with:

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cp: omitting directoy '/var/log/'
At this point, I attempted to navigate to both /mnt/ and /dev/sde/ but was denied permission.

I'll just post the pic I took of the screen later.

Edit: http://i912.photobucket.com/albums/ac32 ... 722351.jpg

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#35 Post by p.H »

Huecuva wrote:It made no response. I assumed it was mounted.
You can check the mounted filesystems with mount or df.
Huecuva wrote:

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cp /var/log/ /mnt/
to which it responds with:

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cp: omitting directoy '/var/log/'
Copying a directory requires -r (recursive). Otherwise, use

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cp /var/log/* /mnt
Huecuva wrote:I attempted to navigate to both /mnt/ and /dev/sde/ but was denied permission.
/dev/sde is a device file, not a directory. You cannot browse it. As root, you should have permission to browse any directory, but /mnt may be empty as your cp command did not copy anything.

PS : I cannot see your picture for now.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#36 Post by Huecuva »

Ugh. Photobucket has become next to useless.

I will try copying the log file again when I get a chance.

EDIT: I decided I'd try it right now. I got the log file to copy. It's pretty long, but here are the last few lines of syslog:

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Mar 14 00:36:31 kernel: [  204.024629] Btrfs loaded, crc32c=crc32c-generic
Mar 14 00:36:31 kernel: [  204.067689] JFS: nTxBlock = 8192, nTxLock = 65536
Mar 14 00:36:31 kernel: [  204.109407] SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, no debug enabled
Mar 14 00:36:32 md-devices: mdadm: No arrays found in config file or automatically
Mar 14 00:36:32 kernel: [  205.108076] device-mapper: uevent: version 1.0.3
Mar 14 00:36:32 kernel: [  205.108675] device-mapper: ioctl: 4.35.0-ioctl (2016-06-23) initialised: dm-devel@redhat.com
Mar 14 00:36:32 partman:   No matching physical volumes found
Mar 14 00:36:32 partman:   Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
Mar 14 00:37:31 kernel: [  263.836117] JBD2: no valid journal superblock found
Mar 14 00:37:31 kernel: [  263.836123] EXT4-fs (sdd1): error loading journal
Mar 14 00:37:42 init: starting pid 437, tty '/dev/tty3': '-/bin/sh'
Does that tell you anything useful? I don't know what this journal is that it seems to be having trouble with but it must have something to do with the file system it can't mount.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#37 Post by p.H »

The only error messages in this quote are related to sdd1. But your previous quote mentionned sdb. Is it the same device with a different name ?

About the error message itself, it seems that it might indicate the SD card capacity is fake.
Could you check it with F3 aka Fight Flash Fraud or Fight Fake Flash ?

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#38 Post by Huecuva »

I must be missing somelthing. I installed F3 from the Software Manager in Mint but I can't find it anywhere to open it and test the SD card. Even when I search for it in the applicatons: nothing. Yet the software manager says it's installed.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#39 Post by p.H »

F3 is a set of command-line tools, so I guess you must run them in a terminal shell. I have only heard about it and never used it.
According to the man pages :
- f3write and f3read run on a mounted filesystem (spreading on the whole device) so you would have to create a filesystem which can be mounted (you can try ext2, ext4 without a journal, FAT).
- f3probe runs on the block device but is flagged experimental (note: might destroy data on the device).

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#40 Post by Huecuva »

Ah. Terminal commands. That explains it. Alright, I will format the SD card to something mountable and give it a scan when I get home from work today.

I've had this card for years though, I'm pretty sure it's good. We'll see.

Also: Yes. Same device with a different name. Every time I tried to get the error log I had to go through the installation again. Had different USBs plugged in for copying, etc,

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#41 Post by p.H »

Another cause might be that the SD card reader cannot access the whole card capacity.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#42 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Huecuva wrote:how I transferred the ISO to the USB stick, I used the USB Image Writer in Linux Mint 18.3 MATE.
I think you should try again and follow the documentation this time:

https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch ... -isohybrid

That GUI tool looks a lot like unetbootin and we know that *does not* work with Debian ISO images.
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#43 Post by p.H »

Please, don't come back on this again. It is just a waste of time. A bad copy of the image does not cause this kind of problem.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#44 Post by Huecuva »

Yeah, I know it's not a bad installation media. I've burned plenty of Linux ISOs (Mint, Debian, Puppy, etc) with Mint USB Image Writer and they've all worked just fine.

Anyway....

So it turns out the problem was the SD card after all. I couldn't get F3 to work. I'm not sure if I was doing it wrong or something but when I looked up the documentation and tried

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./f3probe --destructive --time-ops /dev/sdc
on my Mint machine, it said there was no such file or directory. Whatever. I decided to put another SD card I have, a 16GB one, in the USB adapter and try installing Debian on that instead. And it worked. So Debian is now installing on my 16GB SD card.

Thank you, p.H. You've been an excellent help. I would never have figured any of this out without you, mate.

EDIT: Turns out I still can't put the SD card right into the internal miniPCI-E card reader and install Debian though. It runs so slow in the USB adapter I don't know if it will let me edit the fstab file. I gave it a few minutes and it still wouldn't load more than the wallpaper and mouse cursor. *sigh*.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#45 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Sorry! My OCD made me do it... :roll:
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#46 Post by p.H »

Huecuva wrote:Yeah, I know it's not a bad installation media. I've burned plenty of Linux ISOs (Mint, Debian, Puppy, etc) with Mint USB Image Writer and they've all worked just fine.
Maybe the size of these ISO images is smaller than the actual usable capacity of the SD card.
Huecuva wrote:EDIT: Turns out I still can't put the SD card right into the internal miniPCI-E card reader and install Debian though. It runs so slow in the USB adapter I don't know if it will let me edit the fstab file. I gave it a few minutes and it still wouldn't load more than the wallpaper and mouse cursor. *sigh*.
It's getting confused. IIUC you have two SD cards and two card readers (USB and PCI). What combinations did you use to try to install then run Debian, with what results ?
Note that some (possibly older) USB SD card readers are USB 1.1 only so have a very low throughput (1.5 MB/s at most).

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#47 Post by Huecuva »

p.H wrote:Maybe the size of these ISO images is smaller than the actual usable capacity of the SD card.
No no. This is the first time I've ever tried to install on an SD card. Head_on_a_Stick, as you know, was trying to suggest my USB was bad because I used Mint USB Image Writer, which I've never had a problem with. I've even used this very same USB with this very same Debian 9 Stretch image to install on the SSD I mentioned before in this thread.
p.H wrote:It's getting confused. IIUC you have two SD cards and two card readers (USB and PCI). What combinations did you use to try to install then run Debian, with what results ?
Note that some (possibly older) USB SD card readers are USB 1.1 only so have a very low throughput (1.5 MB/s at most).
I only have one plugged in at a time. The 32GB one was giving me no end of trouble so I decided to see if the 16GB one would work. I used the same USB adapter, and it's USB 3.0 and plugged into a USB 3.0 port. The SD card is kind of old though, which is probably slowing it down a lot. I installed Debian on the SD card while it was in the USB card reader because the installer won't even acknowledge the SD card exists when I put it in the MiniPCI-E card reader. The plan, as suggested by someone in this thread, was to install it using the USB SD card reader and then edit the fstab so that I could move the SD card into the PCI-E card reader, but it's so slow I don't know if it will let me. I tried just booting it from the SD card in the PCI-E card reader and it said it was a read-only file system. It says

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Read-only file system while trying to open /dev/sda1
Disk write-protected; use the -n option to do a read-only check of the device.
fsck exited with status code 8
Then it says write access is unavailable and it cannot proceed.

I just tried booting it from the USB again and it finally loaded the desktop. I added my user to the sudoers list and rebooted and now it's loaded the icons but not the panels :?

Here's my fstab. I'm not sure what changes I need to make so it will boot when I put it in the PCI-E card reader:

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=3ca05a7a-342b-4a1e-9f29-56331ccbfd41 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1

EDIT: Just rebooted again. Still no panels. WTF?

So I figured out how to run the panel manually and it said I couldn't make any changes to it because it was in "kiosk mode". I dug around on the internet for a little bit and found this thread: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8801 (Yeah, I'm using xfce) but I was unable to navigate to the folder mentioned as it doesn't appear to exist. Or I'm doing it wrong.

Man, if it's not one thing it's another.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#48 Post by p.H »

Huecuva wrote:No no. This is the first time I've ever tried to install on an SD card. Head_on_a_Stick, as you know, was trying to suggest my USB was bad because I used Mint USB Image Writer, which I've never had a problem with.
OK, I misunderstood what you wrote. I thought you meant that you had written ISO images on the SD card with no problem.
Huecuva wrote:I decided to see if the 16GB one would work. I used the same USB adapter, and it's USB 3.0 and plugged into a USB 3.0 port. The SD card is kind of old though, which is probably slowing it down a lot.
Did you observe unusual slowness during the installation too or only at runtime ?
Also, did you measure its read and write speed ?
I run Debian a Stretch LXDE installation (not a live ISO image) from a rather slow 8 GB USB 2.0 stick which has an average read speed of 15 MB/s (and a much lower write speed) and it is not that slow. I just made a few adjustments to put anything volatile (/tmp, /var/log, /var/cache) on tmpfs.
Huecuva wrote:I tried just booting it from the SD card in the PCI-E card reader and it said it was a read-only file system.
SD cards have a "write only" lock which is sensed by a switch inside the card reader, just like floppy disks and drives. Maybe the switch in the card reader is stuck in "write only" position ?
Did you watch sd/mmc related messages in the kernel log ?
Huecuva wrote:Here's my fstab. I'm not sure what changes I need to make so it will boot when I put it in the PCI-E card reader
You don't have to make any change. As usual, by default the root filesystem is identified by its UUID, not its device name.

I have no clue why Xfce does not work as expected. I do not use it. Did you check the kernel log for I/O errors on the SD card ?

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#49 Post by Huecuva »

p.H wrote:Did you observe unusual slowness during the installation too or only at runtime ?
Also, did you measure its read and write speed ?
I run Debian a Stretch LXDE installation (not a live ISO image) from a rather slow 8 GB USB 2.0 stick which has an average read speed of 15 MB/s (and a much lower write speed) and it is not that slow. I just made a few adjustments to put anything volatile (/tmp, /var/log, /var/cache) on tmpfs.
It seemed fine during installation. Meh. It's booting. It actually seems a bit faster now that it has booted more than once. Maybe it was just the initial first time setup that was taking so long. I'm not too concerned about it. Once I get it working in the PCI-E card reader it won't be getting rebooted very often anyway.
p.H wrote:SD cards have a "write only" lock which is sensed by a switch inside the card reader, just like floppy disks and drives. Maybe the switch in the card reader is stuck in "write only" position ?
Did you watch sd/mmc related messages in the kernel log ?
Yeah there isn't one on the card itself. It's actually a microSD card which I have to put into a miniSD card adapter for the miniPCI-E card reader. I didn't see any switches on the reader either. There is one on the miniSD card adapter and I switched it, but it didn't make any difference. I will have another look at it later today when I get time.
p.H wrote:You don't have to make any change. As usual, by default the root filesystem is identified by its UUID, not its device name.
Well, that's good to know. One less step.
p.H wrote:I have no clue why Xfce does not work as expected. I do not use it. Did you check the kernel log for I/O errors on the SD card ?
No, but I can. Where do I find that?

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#50 Post by debiman »

why can't i UNsubscribe from this thread...

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