Hi Adrian,
On Tue, 05 Oct 2021 18:54:15 +0100,
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Marc!
>
> On 10/5/21 19:46, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> > It looks like we reached the same point in parallel! I also realise I
> > should have given a few more details about my setup, because it isn't
> > at all obvious from my email.
> >
> > The machine I use has no CDROM (it is what Apple used to call a
> > Cluster node), and cannot boot from USB. So the only way to install
> > Debian is to dump the NETINST image on the hard drive (take it to
> > another box, dd the image, move it back) and boot from that. It works
> > fine and I land in the installer
> >
> > However, as the initrd doesn't contain the SATA driver, it is unable
> > to mount the image where all the udeb for the kernel modules are, and
> > at this point I was stuck.
>
> Did you use the NETINST or netboot image? Those are not the
> same. netboot are for actual netboot and contain different drivers.
The image I used is debian-11.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso:
maz@valley-girl:~$ md5sum debian-11.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso
d53a296c3db4881a1c64345e1afa9056 debian-11.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso
I'm not sure the machine can actually netboot (from distant memory,
netbooting PowerMacs was a tricky business).
> Either way, I will check the d-i configuration for cdrom and check whether
> those modules are not included in the debian-installer build.
Happy to test another image when you have one.
> Can you just tell me whether it offered to create an HFS /boot
> partition?
It does offer to create one:
SCSI3 (0,0,0) (sdb) - 480.1 GB ATA CT480BX500SSD
> #1 32.3 kB Apple
> #2 256.0 MB f hfs untitled /boot/grub
> #3 478.8 GB f ext4 untitled /
> #4 1.0 GB f swap swap swap
> 25.1 kB FREE SPACE
However, if I select this partition, HFS isn't in the list of file
systems (I get Ext{2,3,4}, btrfs, JFS, XFS, FAT{16,32} and swap).
> The whole GRUB installation process is a solved problem. It can just
> be that the "partman-hfs" package is missing in this installer
> image. It's required to set up and format the HFS /boot partition.
I think that could well be it. I guess the partition gets silently
formatted as ext4, which leads to the above failure.
Do let me know if you need any other detail.
Thanks,
M.
--
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
