For the last several days I have been attempting to install Wheezy from one of the daily builds. I have tried four different builds (different days)- and they all fail in the same two spots- they won't recognize my removable medium (usb thumbdrive) so that I can install firmware, and, more importantly, they fail to install Grub.
I have no problem doing an install from a Debian Squeeze install disc I have (6.0.1a). I am telling the install package to completely start fresh each time- new partition table and reformatting the drive. Wouldn't that necessarily rule out any existing problems with the hard drive (partition table, mbr, filesystem)? I use the Graphical Expert Install option. I use the manual partition option when I get to it. I delete all the existing partition then recreate it. I have a 120GB SSD drive- I only partition one 40Gb primary partition for the entire ext4 filesystem (mounted at / with bootable flag on) plus one 6Gb swap file. The rest of the drive is left "free space". I would think this to be a very simple setup and the same setup works fine if I use the Squeeze install disc. The install won't recognize my usb thumbdrive- this is exasperating but minor compared to the Grub problem. Of course that means I have no Internet connection, so no mirror use for install. When I select the "Install the GRUB boot loader on a hard disk" menu option I get this error: "Grub installation failed. The 'grub-pc' package failed to install into /target/. Without the GRUB boot loader, the installed system will not boot". I then go to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and look at /var/log/syslog. Here are a few of the seemingly relevant lines from the last screen (not all lines included here, but they are in proper sequential order): "grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-legacy which isn't installed." "in-target: E: Package 'grub-pc' has no installation candidate." "grub-installer: info: Calling 'apt-install grub-pc' failed" "chroot: can't execute 'grub-probe': No such file or directory" "File descriptor 4 (/dev/tty1) leaked on lvdisplay in vocation." "Volume group "sda" not found." "Skipping volume group sda." "WARNING ***: Configuring 'grub-installer' failed." "WARNING ***: Menu item 'grub-installer' failed" "DEBUG: resolver (libgcc1): package doesn't exist (ignored)" "DEBUG: resolver (libslang2-udeb): package doesn't exist (ignored)" "INFO: Falling back to the package description for espeakup-udeb." I can mount the usb drive (if I hadn't already) in order to save the debug files. I can also mount the hard drive (sda1). I can continue without the boot loader and I get the message "You will need to boot manually with the /vmlinuz kernel on partition /dev/sda1 and root=/dev/sda1 passed as a kernel argument." As an additional pain, I have not found a way to do that (after hours of searching the web for help). When I reboot I sometimes get the "grub rescue>" prompt- I haven't found how to use that (help is not available and none of the web searches I run find discussions relevant to Debian with this version of Grub, as opposed to discussions of old Grub or Ubuntu LiveCD installs). Actually, this last time I just got a blinking cursor in the top left corner when I booted. Evidently others are using these netinstall cd's with no problem (amd64). I am new to Linux- this is really difficult for me to figure out. Can you help? Here are the four netinstall cd's I have tried: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily.old/20110829-1/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily.new/20110826-7/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-CD-1.iso (Aug 22) I can post the gzipped install debug files if anyone is willing to look at them. I have several "rescue" discs, but nothing I have tried works to install Grub properly (maybe because they have different versions of Grub?). I have also tried Ubuntu boot-repair. Thanks, Keith Ostertag (keitho AT strucktower DOT com) Lenovo Thinkpad T520, Intel graphics only, 4Gb ram, 120Gb SSD. -- 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/558ceed176bff25348308b71fe7d24cf.squir...@webmail.strucktower.com
