Package: installation-reports Boot method: CD Image version: debian-40r3-i386-netinst.iso Date: 2008 June 6
Machine: IBM Thinkpad T42 Processor: Pentium M 1.8 GHz Memory: 1.5 GB Partitions: installed on an unpartitioned 4 GB USB flash drive Output of lspci -knn (or lspci -nn): (irrelevant) Base System Installation Checklist: (all OK except as noted below) Comments/Problems: This computer supports booting from USB, so I decided to install debian on a USB Flash drive. I wanted an encrypted root partition. PROBLEM 1. I first tried the "automatic" encrypted LVM setup. It insisted upon making a swap partition, and I was unable to delete that partition. Of course I don't want a swap partition on a flash based drive. I ultimately had to back up several steps and do a manual setup. PROBLEM 2. Before I started the install, I used dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda to write random data to the drive, which makes cracking an encrypted partition/drive much more difficult. However, the debian installer insisted on writing (zeros?) to the to-be-encrypted partition before formatting. This was very time consuming, wasteful/redundant, and perhaps a security liability as well. In fact, the installer did this several times due to problem 1 ;) I should be able to skip that writing since I already did it myself. PROBLEM 3. System would not boot!! ..... It brought up the grub menu just fine, and began loading the kernel and initramfs. The problem occured when it tried to configure lvm (/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/lvm) -- the kernel had not yet detected the presence of the USB Flash drive! Thus the call to activate_vg "$ROOT" was doomed to failure, since udev had not yet discovered the root device. A few seconds after the failure messages, udev discovered the device -- udev had "settled" before running local-top, but the USB event came later. In order to solve this problem, I added a script to /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount that waits for the device to appear in the /dev tree: echo -n "Waiting for /dev/sda5 to appear" while ! [ -b /dev/sda5 ]; do echo -n .; sleep 1s; done It took me several days to figure out what the problem was, how to fix it, and how to use initramfs to roll the initrd, but now it works! Although my script could probably be more robust. IMO, the debian-installer should always set up the init system to wait for the $ROOT (and $resume?) partitions to be visible in the /dev tree before proceeding with the local-top scripts. ~David. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
