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Installing Debian 9 from live image

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Huecuva
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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.

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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.

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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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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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