I found out by trial and error that, although directions don't mention making the USB-key bootable, I must make its first partition bootable.
Now I can boot the installer. However, when it looks for the ISO, rather than look for it on the USB-key (/dev/sdb) (or at least I didn't catch it), it looks for an ISO in the partitions of my target drive (/dev/sda). Not finding any, the installation fails with message, "No kernel modules were found". The most obvious problem would be that my installer and kernel versions are incompatible. I rechecked, and made sure I got my debian 6.0 alpha1 installer from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ and my initrd.gz and vmlinuz files from http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/ . So I do have properly matched versions. The problem seems to be that the installer looks for the ISO on my target (ext3) HD instead of my (FAT) USB-key. While the failure message is being displayed, I do Alt-F2 to go to a bash shell and do a ls, it lists the directories on my target HD, sda rather than the USB-key, sdb. Shouldn't the shell be looking at the USB-key? When I issue the mount command, I find that my USB-key, /dev/sdb1, is mounted on /hd-media type vfat. When I cd to /hdmedia, I find debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso, initrd.gz, ldlinux.sys, vmlinuz, and syslinux.cfg file, which has in it: default vmlinuz append initrd=initrd.gz So the USB-key is mounted, has the right versions of the files, the syslinux.cfg file has the correct information. Why is the installer then not picking up the ISO from the key instantly rather than search for it on the target HD? Haines Brown -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87lj814ax0....@teufel.historicalmaterialism.info
