Hi, i now realize that Gene by "rp4" indicated some known Raspberry system. So my proposal about netboot might be hopeless according to the answers of David and didier.gaumet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- But there is technical stuff left to discuss: I wrote: > > SD card seems to be the intended target for netboot images. > > http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/ > > [...] > > Those are not ISO9660 but rather partitioned images with a FAT32 > > filesystem: > > [...] > > Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type > > firmware.a64-olinuxino.img1 * 2048 199999 197952 96.7M c W95 Gene Heskett wrote: > What does this do that the iso doesn't, Those are images for disk-like devices only and they don't look like they are supposed to boot directly via EFI. The Debian arm64 ISOs on the other hand offer typical EFI boot equipment. > and note it takes a windows machine to follow those instructions. If you mean http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images/README.concatenateable_images then immediately before the MS-Windows instructions, i read: "To create a complete image from the two parts on Linux systems, you can use zcat as follows: zcat firmware.<board_name>.img.gz partition.img.gz > complete_image.img " I inspected both image parts by gunzip-ing them: $ gunzip firmware.a64-olinuxino.img.gz $ /sbin/fdisk -lu firmware.a64-olinuxino.img ... lots of message lines ... $ gunzip partition.img.gz $ sudo mount partition.img /mnt/fat $ find /mnt/fat | less So i would simply provide another useless use of cat with my superuser hat on: # cat firmware.a64-olinuxino.img partition.img | dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sdf1 (Insert "sudo" where needed, if your system has no superuser.) > I think what I will do next is send gparted to create a gpt table with a > fat32 first partition of a gig or so, and do an ext4 on the rest of it. > Then put the iso on sdf. The ISO brings its own partition table. Your gparted work will be wasted. See the second grey box at https://wiki.debian.org/RepackBootableISO#arm64_release_9.4.0 which shows fdisk output for arm64 ISOs. (Nothing did change in the ISO partitioning for 10.0 since 9.4.) > Since these come as NTFS formatted cards these days, Filesystems on the card get overwritten by the ISO or at least lose their entry in the partition table, if they are not reached by dd's work. > I would think that > writing the iso to /dev/sdf would at least start the install, and the > installers disk utils could take care of the rest. What the iso wrote > should be all that counts. As said, Debian arm64 netinst ISOs offer boot entries for EFI. Googling "raspberry rp4 efi" shows that the combination of Raspberry and EFI is exotic. > I have also been thru your installer docs Mine ? I only write docs about things like optical drives or ISO 9660 filesystems. By the latter i happen to be involved in the first boot step of most Debian ISOs. > I feel like I'm playing pin the tale on the donkey, blindfolded. As said, i think that David and didier.gaumet show more clue than i do. So try to get a donkey with tail already attached. I understand that David's advise is to look at https://raspbian.org/RaspbianImages https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ Have a nice day :) Thomas
