Which Debian iso image to use

[oz]

For future reference, could you tell us how you saved and restored to that "save point"?

There are a number of imaging applications available for Linux that you can choose from. Clonezilla, Ghost4Linux, FSArchiver, Mondo Rescue, and PartImage are but a few of them. Some users simply use the dd command to create system images. Several of the above options are available on the Parted Magic LiveCD.

[th3tr4n]

Hello all,

After putting my hardware together I started the installation, but it didn't get nowhere. Due to the limitation of my hardware, the only choice for me is to install debian using netinstall methode. However I don't have CD rom drive available, so I have to boot from hard disk then start the installation from there. Here is what I did:

1/ Formated hard drive with Magic Patition 8.0 using windows machine to FAT32
2/ Extracted netboot/debian-installer/i386/linux and hd-media/initrd.gz files to my hd
3/ Downloaded GRUB 1.97 then extracted to hd. All of steps above were done on windows machine
4/ Moved HDD to the target machine
4/ Set BIOS to boot from HDD-0
5/ Started the machine nothing happend, just a "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press...."

After digging into the Debian installation guide here is what they say:
"Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (or sometimes /boot/boot/grub/) and add an entry for the installer, for example (assuming /boot is on the first partition of the first disk in the system):

title New Install
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz"

I couldn't locate the menu.lst as shown in the instruction above. About those files with .gz extention that I copied to hdd, should it be extracted before copy them to hdd or should I just leave as it is in .gz format? To extract them I used Winrar to do the job. Currently I don't have machine that runs Linux to try different options such as booting from usb drive because the USB drive boot need some work that can only be done on machine that runs Linux. I have burned a Debian bootable CD and it just worked fine on my windows machine. I would ruled out the bad Hdd scenario because this is the working one I just pulled from a working system. Besides, I was able to connect it to my laptop using a USB/IDE adapter to copy files. Please help me out. Thanks and have a good weekend.

Best regards,
T.L

[thrifty_bob]

I will not pretend to be an expert, but since its 4 am, and you likely won't get a lot of replies from the guru's till later, it sounds to me that since you have no cd-rom or dvd-rom drive, that if you could boot from the USB with a net install, you might solve it that way, but you are saying you can't run the linux tools to create it because you only have windows avail to work with? Are you sure it can boot from USB? That's a relatively new feature, IMO.

I used unetbootin to create a USB net boot for my frugalware distro. I noticed they have debian lenny available as a program option as well. I tried it from my vista machine and found that you need to quick format the USB stick to fat32 first, then run the unetbootin on it to create the bootable USB, then safely remove it, move to other PC, and then boot it up, and it worked.

The wiki below is for debian and shows a couple other windows programs that might work. The particular wiki is for another machine, but it seems to have similar limitations to yours. Maybe you can glean a solution from it, but I doubt the img file they are using there would be the right one for your application.

Sorry, the forum will not allow to post the link because I don't have 15 posts. I suggest you google: DebianEeePC HowTo Install wiki

That said, having cheap old crusty hardware around that you can steal parts from is priceless. I bet I've thrown away 5 or 10 perfectly good cd-rom drives lately. I only kept 4 spares, and junked the rest.

PS: thanks ozar for the enlightening post above

[devils casper]

Do not extract .gz files. You have to create menu.lst file manually.
Post Filenames of all files inside /boot and /grub folder here.

[Jonathan183]

My personal preference is the netinstall method as stated earlier, but I generally don't have to re-download or re-install when anything goes wrong....

The problem I've always had with downloading entire distribution CD/DVD disks is that much of the software on them usually becomes out dated within just a few weeks. Still, I can respect the methods of others and why they might choose a certain way of doing things.

I have used the DVD for Debian install for a few reasons:-
1. One of the systems does not have net access, so a net install is not practical.
2. I wanted to install Debian on a couple of systems, downloading packages for each individually did not seem like the right thing to do.

I can also:-
Determine securty features I want to apply to the system before it is exposed to the net to download updates etc.
Know if I repeat the same install process I will end up with an identical system, and the software forms a consistent set.

I will pull in security updates for the systems that see the net, but I intend using the software packages on the DVD as much as I can. For latest and greatest release versions I have Arch installed, but want Debian to be rock solid ...

I prefer setting up a system offline, and connecting to the net afterwards ... I like the fact Debian lets me do that .

[th3tr4n]

devil casper,

This is what I did
1/ Created boot/newinstall directory and sub directory boot and newinstall
2/ Downloaded initrd.gz and linux to newinstall directory
3/ Created a text file name with the following:
title New Insatll
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/newinstall/linux
initrd /bbot/newinstall/initrd.gz
and saved as menu.lst
4/ Copied it to newinstall directory
5/ Extracted grub-1.97 to the hdd

Please tell me if I did something wrong in the steps above. Should I extract Grub or just leave it as grub-1.97.gz?
Once I extracted grub, it created a folder grub-1.97 and a whole bunch of sub folder in it. This is the path of one folder name boot as following:
/grub-1.97/boot/i386/pc
where should I copy the menu.lst file to? Thank you for you time

Best Regards,

T.L