Hi Rob, I see Andy has been helping you!
On Sat, Nov 19, 2022 at 03:38:33PM +0000, r...@tekhax.io wrote: >Thanks, after messing with it for quite awhile, I finally got it to work with >the standard ISO. > >I booted with the Arch live image and did: > >wipefs -a /dev/nvme0n1 >dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=512 count=100000 > >then I used efibootmgr to delete all existing entries. > >Once I did that, the netinst booted into the installer >immediately. Not sure if it was the actual existence of valid >partitions on the drive, or just the existence of EFI entries in the >table. If your system has (had) existing EFI boot entries, then the firmware would normally attempt to boot those. AIUI you selected the USB stick and that failed to boot? The partitioning on Debian images is slightly complex, to make them work as a so-called "isohybrid". (This means that you can use the same image both when written to optical media and when written to a USB stick.) But the partitions should still show up. For example, looking at the netinst image file here: $ fdisk -l debian-11.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso Disk debian-11.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso: 382 MiB, 400556032 bytes, 782336 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x5004a58b Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type debian-11.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso1 * 0 782335 782336 382M 0 Empty debian-11.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso2 4064 9247 5184 2.5M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32) The first partition covers the whole of the image; the second one is *just* the EFI boot setup that you've seen already. If you're only seeing the second partition then it appears there is some other problem here. Checking your original report here, you said you wrote to the USB stick using dd if=<debian.iso> of=/dev/sdb. Did you run "sync" or similar to make 100% sure that the image was all flushed to the USB stick before removing it / booting it? Unless you tell it otherwise, Linux will cache writes to USB drives and it can appear that writes have completed well before the data is actually written to the drive. This is a common cause of confusion for people in this situation, I'm afraid. Andy already mentioned a different way to force writing data, using the "oflag=sync" option to dd. Using that with "bs=4M" should also give good performance when writing out an image to a USB stick. Could you possibly retry this and check if it works for you please? -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com < liw> everything I know about UK hotels I learned from "Fawlty Towers"
