Hi!
> Can you give me pointers where those bugreports exist? Do you have
> first hand experience that it's not working correctly?
> I made netboot images onto my USB sticks and they worked.
This exchange is sadly pretty common when it comes to unetbootin and we see
this frequently in #debian. Whenever we get a user reporting a very odd error
from the installer, we ask them how they transferred the image to the USB
stick and if they say "unetbootin" we just recommend they start again because
it is well known to cause problems. Two things then always follow: (1) the
problem is solved and the installation completes fine (2) a 3rd party will chip
in that unetbootin always works just fine for them [sadly often also
accompanied by (3) them telling us we don't know what we're talking about].
We have been unable to figure out what differentiates the users for whom
unetbootin does not work from the users for whom it does work. The users who
have chosen to use unetbootin are almost invariably not the right people to
help debug such problems and so the impasse is perpetuated. (While unetbootin
can also do other things like have multiple images on the one disk, that's not
the user base we are normally seeing.)
Off the top of my head the are the sorts of errors we frequently see are
catalogued below. I've quickly grabbed some links from upstream's bug tracker
that may (or may not!) provide some more details. All of these errors go away
when the exact same image is copied onto the exact same USB stick using cp as
detailed in the install guide (or dd or cat or win32diskimager or anything
else that just copies the image rather than trying to do whatever mangling
unetbootin does).
* boot error messages: the prepared image is deeply unhappy and you don't even
get as far as a boot loader. (The normal symptom reported by the user is "why
aren't debian iso images bootable?"...)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1198731
* d-i starts but then dies weirdly, seemingly skipping the entire installation
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1348956
* d-i dies very early with "No CD was detected": for some reason, the mounted
image is not found by the installer and you don't get past the very first part
of the installer where it tries to find the d-i components.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/622075
* installing the base system fails: sometimes it can't find the .debs,
sometimes it can't figure out how to extract them properly
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1048913
* even once d-i looks to have successfully completed, it often seems to
install grub to the wrong device and/or has sufficiently confused grub-install
as to get the wrong device.map so that the system isn't bootable
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/1034975
Clearly not everyone hits these errors but enough do that it's a pain. The
errors seem so unrelated to unetbootin that it's very hard to convince users
to try remaking the image -- after all, once the kernel is booted and
userspace has started, unetbootin should be irrelevant, right? If only.
> Also please note it's not a Debian specific tool. But it may exists in
> Fedora as well for example. Those users may install a Debian boot to
> their USB sticks. Adding a warning for our users won't warn other
> users using UNetbootin.
Indeed, it would be wonderful if this were actually fixed upstream (or at least
documented upstream). In the absence of that, we at least reach a good portion
of the user base by noting this in Debian (and its derivatives).
cheers
Stuart
--
Stuart Prescott http://www.nanonanonano.net/ [email protected]
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/ [email protected]
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