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Installing Debian 9 from live image

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spartrekus
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#16 Post by spartrekus »

Huecuva wrote:Hi.

So I've downloaded the live USB image of Debian 9 and it appears that you can use the live image to try out Stretch OR you can boot the installer and install the OS, but not both. There does not appear to be a way to launch the installer from the live image and install while you're running live Debian from the USB like EVERY OTHER LINUX DISTRO EVER. I realize the whole live image thing is new to Debian and I installed Jesse on my server without using a live image, but it just seems like the option to install the OS should have been built into the live image. I have tried typing

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sudo debian-installer-launcher
in the terminal and it just said the command was not found. Am I missing something?

The main problem is that I'm trying to install Stretch on an SD card, which needs to be mounted before I can do that. Unfortunately, the installer doesn't mount the SD card and doesn't even detect it as being present but when I boot the live Debian image, it is there, and I can mount it but I cannot install Debian on it.
you could maybe try to unpack the image squashfs to a drive.
Bring the grub sector 446 to the disk /dev/sda (will destroy all)
Bring the partitions with fdisk, create ext3, and place the content of squashfs, in other word populate, and do not forget to check the initramfs and kernel (to be found at boot)

Huecuva
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#17 Post by Huecuva »

Well, I managed to get the graphical installer to detect the SD card with a USB adapter. I figured I'd just edit fstab when the install was done and then move the SD card to the internal reader. Unfortunately, the installer seems to have trouble properly partitioning the SD card and leaves it completely unreadable by anything I tried until finally I gave up and used my Widows 10 rig to make it usable again.

spartrekus
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#18 Post by spartrekus »

Huecuva wrote:Well, I managed to get the graphical installer to detect the SD card with a USB adapter. I figured I'd just edit fstab when the install was done and then move the SD card to the internal reader. Unfortunately, the installer seems to have trouble properly partitioning the SD card and leaves it completely unreadable by anything I tried until finally I gave up and used my Widows 10 rig to make it usable again.
I do not understand what you did. likely you need gparted live on an sd to have a linux loaded on the ram, with all stuffs
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/gpart ... 1-i686.iso
once you have this you have a linux on ram on an usb stick, to start to play

1: which live image do you want to have on your harddisk?
have you a squashfs image, loaded from the grub.cfg
maybe you could give us more infos...

everything is possiible with linux ;) !
(and FreeBSD too ;)))

Huecuva
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#19 Post by Huecuva »

What I did was put my SD card in a USB card reader and then launch the graphical Debian installer. The installer detected the SD card just fine but when I selected the option to use guided partitioning and use the whole disk, it tries and then fails, leaving the SD card completely unreadable. I had to use Windows 10 to repartition and format it before anything would read it again because GParted and Parted Magic (UBCD) couldn't do anything with it. Yes, I tried them both. I'm pretty sure GParted isn't going to help me partition the SD card for Linux. I'm not sure what other "infos" you need.

Like I said, I'll just use the SD card for storage and install Debian on an SSD instead. It will make it a bit more of a pain to put more music on the storage drive (SD card) when I decide to do that instead of just being able to pop it out, plug it into my Windows rig and dump some MP3s on it, but...eh. C'est la vie.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#20 Post by p.H »

Huecuva wrote:I selected the option to use guided partitioning and use the whole disk, it tries and then fails, leaving the SD card completely unreadable. I had to use Windows 10 to repartition and format it before anything would read it again because GParted and Parted Magic (UBCD) couldn't do anything with it.
1) IMO, guided partitioning sucks.

2) IME, GParted and generally all libparted-based partition managers (including partman, the Debian installer partitioning tool), behave badly with invalid or non-standard partition tables. The good old fdisk often works better on these.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#21 Post by Huecuva »

The Debian installer partitioning tool doesn't seem to have any problems partitioning anything else I throw at it, like the SSD I installed it on. Just the SD card for some reason. If guided partitioning sucks so bad, I guess you would suggest manually partitioning? I just use guided partitioning because it's generally good enough for my purposes. I'd have to figure out what partitions I'm supposed to be creating.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#22 Post by p.H »

Huecuva wrote:you would suggest manually partitioning?
Yes.
Huecuva wrote:I just use guided partitioning because it's generally good enough for my purposes. I'd have to figure out what partitions I'm supposed to be creating.
If you have used guided partitioning, you have seen what partition it creates.
For a BIOS boot installation on MBR, you must create at least a root partition, and a swap partition if you need it. On GPT, you should create an extra 1 MB unformatted BIOS boot partition.
For an EFI boot installation either on MBR or GPT, you must also create an EFI partition.

Huecuva
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#23 Post by Huecuva »

Alright, perhaps I'll give manually partitioning a try this weekend, though I'm not sure how doing it automatically or manually makes a difference. Whether I tell it what partitions to create or let a script do the talking, the commands are pretty much the same and the guided partitioning always fails.

Huecuva
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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#24 Post by Huecuva »

So I've tried manually partitioning the SD card. I've managed to deduce that the Debian installer fails on formatting the partitions it creates. I have tried pre-partitioning and pre-formatting the SD card in GParted, but unfortunately the Debian installer does not let you skip this step and use existing partitions, throwing errors like "No root file system is defined". Instead, it insists on partitioning and formatting the disk itself, which promptly fails, preventing install.

Ugh.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#25 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Huecuva wrote:unfortunately the Debian installer does not let you skip this step and use existing partitions, throwing errors like "No root file system is defined"
I can assure you that it is in fact possible to use pre-existing (and pre-formatted) partitions in the installer because I have done just that several times over the past few days.

The trick is to choose "Manual Partitioning" then select the desired root partition, pick the "use as" option and choose the filesystem, once this is done you should see a "mount point" option that will allow you to set that as the root partition, IIRC.
deadbang

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#26 Post by Huecuva »

Ah, yes. That was the next thing I was going to try, but I got side tracked. I will give that a shot. Thanks!

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#27 Post by Huecuva »

The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in SCSI7 (0,0,0), partition #1 (sdb) at / failed.

I set the boot flag on the partition I'm trying to install on and set the mount point to /. This is the exact error the partitioner keeps giving me when it fails whether I use the guided partitioning or not, so it might not actually be failing on formatting after all. It seems to be able to format the partition (though it only gives the option to not format when I have created a swap partition in GParted as well). Is this because I have the SSD that is sda? I told the partitioner not to use that drive but maybe it's still interfering? I will try removing it next time I'm messing with this thing.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#28 Post by p.H »

Huecuva wrote:This is the exact error the partitioner keeps giving me when it fails
What error exactly ? I do not remember that you posted it already.
Could you also switch to the log console (tty4) after the error and get the relevant messages ?
Huecuva wrote:Is this because I have the SSD that is sda?
No, it should not matter.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#29 Post by Huecuva »

p.H wrote:What error exactly ? I do not remember that you posted it already.
It's the first line in my last post. I didn't put it in a code block though, sorry.

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The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in SCSI7 (0,0,0), partition #1 (sdb) at / failed. 
It's have trouble mounting root, for some reason.
p.H wrote:Could you also switch to the log console (tty4) after the error and get the relevant messages ?
I sure can! How do I do that?

I'm trying to put everything on one partition for pure simplicity. This rig has enough RAM I don't think I even need to bother with a swap partition, since it's on an SD card. Is there some other way it needs to be partitioned? It should be possible to boot from root, right? Every guided partitioning I've ever done has done that.

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Re: Installing Debian 9 from live image

#30 Post by p.H »

Partition #1 should be sdb1, not sdb.
Press Alt+FN to switch to console N, so Alt+F4 for tty4, plus Ctrl if switching from the graphic installer.

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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.
deadbang

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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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