Debian Installation Disaster!

[sburtchin]

While installing packages there were lots of errors reading the installation CD's. Almost all flashed by too quick to see, but in the end, I got one message that stayed long enough to read:

Errors were encountered while processing:
kiten
kdeedu
kdeamusements
kde

After that, I had no GUI, just a black screen and a prompt. This is my first time ever using Linux so I just wanted to reboot and see if things were OK. I think the command I used was "shutdown -r now". It did'nt reboot though. A few messages flashed, then the screen went black. Finally I hit the power button. On the next power-up, Debian booted into a very minimal GUI. I have a mouse cursor, a colored screen, file manager, and a menu similar to the Windows "Start" menu. That's all!

The whole process probably took over 5 hours, so if this is fixable, I would really appreciate any help you can give so I don't have to go through that again!

INSTALL DETAILS:
Everything went fine according to the installation guide until I was asked what "Apt access method" I wanted. I selected "cdrom" because I have all 14 CD's (v3.1r1). Then I get the message:

This program was unable to autodetect a CD-ROM drive, or there is no usable CD in the drive.

There was no CD in the drive because the installer had told me previously to remove it. So I put CD1 back in and tried again - 4 times! I kept getting the message:

hdd: irq timeout: status = 0xd0 {busy}
hdd: irq timeout: status = 0x00
hdd ATAPI reset complete

Some other messages flashed after that too. I thought maybe it was done with the first CD so I put in CD2. Same error on the first try, but on the second try, it read index files from it. Same with CD3 and CD4. Then I put CD1 back in, and on the third try it read index files from there too. I let it read index files from all 14 CD's. Most required two or three attempts (some more), but all gave the above error at least once. Other messages filled the screen but flashed too quickly to read. After each CD I was asked if I had another CD "like the second of a 2 CD set". I was never asked to supply a specific CD. I hope I did it right because none of this was in the installation guide.

Also, I had a lot of problems getting it to read the CD's on the default mount point of "/dev/cdrom", so I changed the mount point to "/cdrom" because that's where the messages said it was mounted.

After the last CD the package installation screen came up and I accidentally hit "Enter" instead of "Space", so nothing got selected. The installation finished soon after that. I logged in as root. All I had was a black screen and command prompt.

The installation manual says I can run "base-config" at any time, so I did that. This time I selected Desktop environment, Mail, PostgreSQL and Manual Selection. Next, I got what I think was "aptitude". I read all the stuff that it was going to install, and I probably selected about 15 more packages that looked interesting (or were "recommended" for packages already selected). Then I hit "g" thinking it would ask for specific install CD's, but it started downloading packages off the internet (a couple hundred I think)! Why would it do that? When this finished, it asked for the "Binary 1" CD. I put in CD1. It took several tries to read it and there were lots of errors. Then it asked for "Binary 2" CD. This had lots of errors on the first attempt, but read OK on the second attempt. No more CD's were asked for. What are the other 12 CD's for? This is when I got the message about the four packages that had errors installing. Then I just had a black screen and command prompt.

I thought maybe if I ran "base-config" again, it could fix the errors with the four packages. This time I selected everything as before except "Manual Selection". Screen messages showed about 100 packages being uninstalled - including lots of stuff having to do with kde! I only added a handful the last time I used "Manual Selection". Why was it uninstalling so much? This is when I shut down with "shutdown -r now", but there was no reboot. I had to turn off the power.

When I powered back up, things were as explained previously. I could'nt find any shutdown dialog in the GUI, so after I logged out, my only option was to log back in (I did as root). Then I had only the black screen again. I think I used "shutdown -P now" to shut down and power off. That worked.

Please help! --- Thanks!

[sburtchin]

Can somebody please help!

I am anxious to start using Linux. I think the only problem is that some packages are not installed, but I have no idea how to go about fixing that. Can it be fixed?

The Debian install CD's read just fine in Windows. Why cant Linux read them? Can I copy them to the HDD and install from there? Would I copy the contents, or can the installer read ISO files? Do I need all 14 CD's or just the first two?

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. What do I do next?

[craigevil]

Save yourself a ton of pain use the Etch netinstall, in less than an hour you will have a working Debian system. Sarge is getting old and is a pain to install properly.

[sburtchin]

Thanks craigevil for your suggestion to use Etch. Can I just install this over Sarge? I normally set data integrity at a very high priority. Do I need to be concerned about the bug reported here? If not, why? As I understand (from the Dec29 bug report) this bug is Pending Upstream fix.

I would still like to understand what went wrong though. Whatever is causing my CD read errors will likely persist with any version of Linux I have unless I can correct the source of the problem. If I am able to get Sarge working, is it easy then to upgrade to Etch?

I have found a few things to try in other threads here with some similarities to my problem. I still suspect it is only a problem of missing packages, but a more expert opinion would be welcome.

[sburtchin]

I think that most everything is working now, but some things seem to still be missing. When I first log in I get three pop-ups:

The "Show Desktop" applet appears to have died unexpectedly. Do you want to reload this applet?
The "Window List" applet appears to have died unexpectedly. Do you want to reload this applet?
The "Workspace Switcher" applet appears to have died unexpectedly. Do you want to reload this applet?

After answering "NO" to each one, here is what I have:

The bar at the top has the Applications menu, the Actions menu, a File Browser (icon), and a Terminal (icon) on the left and Date & Time and Volume control (icon) on the right. When I have anything running, there is also an icon for (only) the current application at the far right.

On the desktop I have only "Computer", my "Home" folder, and "Wastebasket".

The bar at the bottom is blank.

Everything I can see appears to be working, but I thought there would be more on the menus. I have been searching through the "Help" and also on the Debian website and so far I cannot find anything relevant about troubleshooting this. Is there some kind of self test I can run to verify that everything is working? What else should I see? Is there troubleshooting documentation on-line?

I'm using Epiphany (on Debian) to reply to this thread. I tried using Mozilla, but when I tried to log in to the forums, I got a warning that the connection was not secure. This behaviour is repeatable. Is this normal?

[craigevil]

APT HOWTO - Basic Configuration

f you'd rather use your CD-ROM for installing packages or updating your system automatically with APT, you can put it in your sources.list. To do so, you can use the apt-cdrom program like this:

# apt-cdrom add

with the Debian CD-ROM in the drive. It will mount the CD-ROM, and if it's a valid Debian CD it will look for package information on the disk. If your CD-ROM configuration is a little unusual, you can also use the following options:

-h - program help
-d directory - CD-ROM mount point
-r - Rename a recognized CD-ROM
-m - No mounting
-f - Fast mode, don't check package files
-a - Thorough scan mode

For example:

# apt-cdrom -d /home/kov/mycdrom add

You can also identify a CD-ROM, without adding it to your list:

# apt-cdrom ident

Note that this program only works if your CD-ROM is properly configured in your system's /etc/fstab

[sburtchin]

f you'd rather use your CD-ROM for installing packages or updating your system automatically with APT, you can put it in your sources.list.

In fact, yesterday I was looking at this file with vi because I read in one of the manuals that to get the latest security updates it must contain the following line:

deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

To my surprise it was'nt there. So I added it and again to my surprise ":!w" wrote the changes. I was logged in as a non-privileged user. Is this a security breach, or am I missing something?

I think it is already setup to get files from CD's because it has 14 lines like the following:

deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r1 _Sarge_ - Official i386 Binary-1 (20051220)]/ unstable contrib main

I also went back through the base-config again and asked it to get the packages from the Debian mirrors this time (I selected 3 locations). There are also three pairs of lines similar to the following (in addition to the "cdrom" lines):

deb ftp://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ stable main
deb-src ftp://debian.uchicago.edu/debian/ stable main

There is some progress to report. I used "r-click" -> "+ Add to Panel..." to add the three applets that were dieing unexpectedly and after saving my configuration on logout, they are now there without any errors. I have been reading through the GNOME help information, and I am pretty sure I have everything in the GUI that I am supposed to have except I did'nt see what desktop objects should be there by default. Should there only be three of them on a new install?

The installation manual says that KDE and GNOME are both installed. There were the errors with kde reported previously, and I don't seem to have it. How do I know if kde is working?

I am not able to access my USB HDD in file manager. The relevant lines in "/etc/fstab" for this and for the CD-ROM are:

/dev/sda1       /sda1           vfat    defaults        0       2
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0

These are all the problems I know about. Is there a system diagnostic tool to determine what (if anything) is not working? Before I invest time creating data I want to be sure there is no serious problem with the operating system.

Can I fix this, or do I need to wipe the partition and start over?

[tomt]

If you wish to have 'Show Desktop', 'Window List' & 'Workplace Switcher' on bottom bar simply right click on same, select 'Add to Panel' and click on all 3 applets.
Likely to happen again so simply choose 'Reload Applet' next time this problem occurs.
Regards

[tomt]

Looks like I jumped the gun on previous posting.
For usb disk issue the following as root:
# mkdir /mnt/sda1
Regards

[sburtchin]

For usb disk issue the following as root:
# mkdir /mnt/sda1

Did that. I now have directory "/mnt" and sub-directory "/mnt/sda1" which is empty. I also have "/sda1" which has always been there, and also empty. The Properties dialog says it contains "nothing" and there are "5.7GB" free. The true size is about 95GB and there is lots of data.

The previous progress I made has now reversed itself. After a few problem free logins, the "Show Desktop", "Window List", "Workspace Switcher", and now also the "Window Selector" applets are dieing unexpectedly at login.

Is this fixable?