Thanks so much to all those who took the time to respond to my anguished plea for help trying to get Wheezy installed from a netinstall cd image but the install kept failing to install GRUB. Evidently, this is a common problem with netinstall images.
Thanks to Pelle Carlson,rlharris, David Christensen, Brian, and Camaleón. Pelle Carlson confirmed for me that at least one of the weekly builds was working (Aug22) so that I understood I needed to look more closely at something I was (or wasn't) doing rather than keep trying different builds. rlharris recommended doing a minimal install first, which is pretty much what I wound up doing. David Christensen also recommended using the simplest installer. David- I mostly agree with you about having a small seperate boot partition and may do that again in the future, but for now it seemed simpler to go with the recommended "all files in the same partition". Brian (ad44) who said: > "in-target: E: Package 'grub-pc' has no installation candidate." > "grub-installer: info: Calling 'apt-install grub-pc' failed" "This is [a problem]. Returning to the 'Install the base system' step is an option." This is probably the key piece of info that I needed to hear. When I would get to the error message "Debootstrap Warning. WARNING: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be attempted up to five times" I had been just ignoring it and giving up. I figured that if it didn't work the first time it probably wasn't going to work doing it more times. Well, I was wrong. Forcing it to try again (at this step) in fact did accomplish loading Grub. It may have helped also that I took other peoples advice and was in the simplest install menu (many things automated)- not sure. Brian- also said "Unless there is an overwhelming need to get to testing from a testing installer you can do a Squeeze install of the base system, change /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Wheezy and 'apt-get dist-upgrade'." This was an option that I had already tried. AFAIK when you install Squeeze then full-upgrade to Wheezy you are only updating the packages- NOT the kernel. I needed the 3.0 kernel to fix the problem with my Thinkpad T520 laptop not resuming from sleep properly and to get other features (like TRIM for my SSD). I had also for weeks tried compiling a 3.0 Squeeze kernel to no avail as well- choosing kernel compile options is tricky (for a beginner). At this date, you can't get a 3.0 kernel any way other than a netinstall or compiling your own kernel (AFAIK). Camaleón said: "For GRUB2, you can leave it uninstalled and boot the installed system from a LiveCD/LiveUSB or SGD. Once you're in, install GRUB2 as usual." I had tried this with no luck. For a beginner, installing Grub manually is actually quite complex- I tried several different approaches. Do a search on "grub rescue>" and see how many problems and solutions are out there... So, the netinstall image finally installed Grub, but left me with a very minimal system. I had to learn to manually configure the network and install the desktop. But I was able to do these things and I am glad I did- this way I can start with a fresh un-bloated system and add packages as I want them. Again, thanks to all. Keith Ostertag -- 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/df82939ebe267257467089bc831210a8.squir...@webmail.strucktower.com
