Gary Roach wrote: > I have a Toshiba Qosmio laptop that has 2 60 GB drives. I formatted > one with the Windows XP that is needed to run all of the bells and > whistles that the Qosmio provides. I installed Debian Squeeze on the > other drive and used Grub as the boot loader. This setup worked > fine.
Good. > I recently upgraded to Debian Wheezy using the latest iso net > install disk. This is a confusing statement. Because I do not know of any way to upgrade using a net install disk. You must have done something other than use a net install disk to upgrade. Did you use a net install image to install a new installation of Wheezy? If so that is an important detail because I means that nothing from your previous installation is available and therefore that information is nothing but a distraction. And of course most of us would ask, why install instead of upgrading? Since Debian is all about being able to upgrade from version to version. There is usually no need to re-install. > Since then the system boots to the Grub operating system selection > screen. If I select Debian, the computer starts, loads grub, shuts > down and restarts over and over again. There are various problems with installing Wheezy due to upstream Linux kernel changes. Such as dropping support for various hardware. This means that out of the box some hardware will not be able to boot the current Wheezy 3.2 kernel. See these bug reports for example: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696571 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=698107 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=687442 It all depends upon what hardware you have in your system. You didn't say what hardware you had and so I can only guess that this is the problem since the symptom seems similar. > I managed to get back into the Windows XP side by completely > reloading the XP OS from the factory disks. Sounds painful. Wasn't this other system available from the grub boot selection screen? It should have been. If it wasn't then that would be worth a bug report against the debian-installer. It should also have been possible to boot a bootable rescue disk to boot your MS Windows XP image. One such as this one has worked well for me in the past: http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/ > As long as I select the XP system things work fine. As soon as I try > the Debian system the looping starts again. I tried to reload the > Debian side from the iso disk but the end results are the same. Any > suggestions will be sincerely appreciated. I would boot the net install disk and select Rescue mode and use it to see if installing the firmware-linux-nonfree package allows you to boot. If not then install the proposed Wheezy kernel as described in Bug#687442. Here is the official documentation for it: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s07.html.en But that is fairly terse. Let me say that the rescue mode looks just like the install mode initially. It will ask you keyboard and locale questions and you might wonder if you are rescuing or installing! But it will have "Rescue" in the upper left corner so that you can tell that you are not in install mode and be assured. Get the tool set up with keyboard, locale, timezone, and similar and eventually it will give you a menu with a list of actions. Here is a quick run-through. Advanced options... Rescue mode keyboard dialog ...starts networking... hostname dialog domainname dialog ...apt update release files... ...loading additional components, Retrieving udebs... ...detecting disks... Then eventually it will get to a menu "Enter rescue mode" that will ask what device to use as a root file system. It will list the partitions that it has automatically detected. Select the appropriate partition and continue. At that point it presents a menu "Execute a shell in /dev/...". That should get you a shell on your system with the root partition mounted. It is a /bin/sh shell. I usually at that point start bash so as to have bash command line recall and editing. Then mount any additional partitions if you specified multiple of them. # /bin/bash root@hostname:~# mount -a At that point you have a root superuser shell on the system and can make system changes. After doing what needs doing you can reboot to the system. Remove the Debian install media and boot to the normal system and see if the changes were able to fix the problem. First I would install firmware-linux-nonfree from the nonfree section and see if that solves your problem. deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian wheezy main contrib non-free # apt-get update # apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree If not then do the rescue media boot again and install the proposed Wheezy "drm" 3.4 backport kernel as described in Bug#687442. Bob
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