I am attempting to install jessie on a Dell Poweredge R815 (I have four). It has been running wheezy reliably for years. And running squeeze reliably for years before that. But no matter what I try it won't install or boot.
I have tried two ways. 1. I attempt a fresh install from a USB dongle. It gets all the way to installing grub and then fails. 2. I do a fresh install of wheezy from a USB dongle. It boots wheezy just fine. I do nothing but nano /etc/apt/sources.list (change all instances of wheezy to jessie, save, and exit) apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade (It upgrades without error. I answer the default to all questions.) /sbin/reboot Then it fails to reboot and goes into the initramfs. I have a picture of the screen if anybody wishes. I can reliably install and run wheezy over and over. I have not been able to install or boot jessie despite numerous attempts. Any suggestions? If anybody wishes, I can provide precise details of how I built the USB image of the installer and what answers I gave to all the installer questions. But the short is, I did exactly the same thing on numerous other machines, including Dell T5500s, Dell Poweredge C6145s, and HP DL165s and was able to successfully install and boot jessie. I'm almost certain that the kernel upgrade from wheezy to jessie tickles something that is incompatible with the R815. Also note that while the fresh install was successfull on the C6145 (all four that I own), the hardware detection phase of the fresh install from USB took hours (all four) and booting jessie also takes hours to do systemd configuration of the network and MD arrays (all four). dmesg (all four) reports continual usb 1-5.2: reset high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci even though nothing is connected to USB. The C6145s (all four) ran wheezy reliably for years (and squeeze for years before that) without such issues. I did the exact same install on my T5500s (eleven). These have exactly the same disks partitioned exactly the same way and none of the T5500s exhibit any issues. I believe that there are also issues with the change of kernel from wheezy to jessi that tickles something that is incompatible with the C6145, but is less severe than that that tickles the R815. Jeff (http://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi)