Debian – How to install debian without games, office etc…

Silly me, the answer was right there in the Debian forums if I knew where to look. It was as you guessed, Guardian, to do with the initrd. The thing is, the DVD image initrd contains more modules than the netboot one. The pertinent ones here being SATA drivers. So I followed the advice in the 9th post in that thread and it worked like a charm.

I'm quoting the solution here in its entirety in case the link goes dead:

I was trying to get this exact setup and I've been tearing my hair out, turns out the solution is quite simple:

The initrd for the netboot image does not contain any ide or sata drivers and they are meant to be retrieved during a regular install, I'm not sure exactly whether they are just not present on the DVD or the installer does not detect or expect them if you are using a mirror of the DVD ( or any install cd ). However there is a solution and that is to make your own initrd.gz with the drivers present.

I've adapted here from

http://wiki.openvz.org/Modifying_initrd_image

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-423963.html

First I got the initrd.gz for the netboot and off the netboot install cd, but I think the DVD initrd.gz should be fine then:

mkdir netboot-initrd-dir mkdir cd-initrd-dir gunzip netboot-initrd gunzip cd-initrd cd netboot-initrd-dir cpio -i < ../netboot-initrd cd ../cd-initrd-dir cpio -i < ../cd-initrd

Now you will have two directories with the contents of both inird.gz files, you can see what driver files are in each one by:

find ./netboot-initrd-dir -iname *.ko find ./cd-initrd-dir -iname *.ko

you should notice that there is a lot more from the one on the cd, in particular the ide and sata drivers. You can probably be more precise with this is you need to have a smaller image, but I managed to get away with:

cp -nr cd-initrd-dir/lib/modules/2.6.32-5-486/kernel/* netboot-initrd->dir/lib/modules/2.6.32-5-486/kernel/

now you just have to put it back together with:

cd netboot-initrd-dir find . | cpio -H newc -o > ../new-netboot-initrd cd ../ gzip ./new-netboot-initrd

Now you should be able to take that file and stick it in your tftp directory under initrd.gz or similar and it will now detect your disks!

Hope that helps you out.

maynim

What do you want from that LiveCD? Maybe a DVD that boots for you is fine for that if it lends you a shell (try Ctrl-Alt-F2/F3/...) and provides the tools needed.

Try getting to the console, chrooting into the system installed (but lacking the bootloader) and running grub-install (with no additional arguments) by hand to see the error message. Did you mount ESP into /boot/efi/?

Rod's books page on the topic is also highly recommended.

How exactly did you write the ISO to the pendrive? dd(1) or a win32 equivalent like SUSE Image Writer should do fine.

Shameless plug: I have implemented UEFI support in ALT Linux, and if our regular builds work for you then I can probably translate/explain the relevant bits of mkimage-profiles documentation so you can prepare the derivative needed (or use it to prepare a bootable root so that you can work on your Debian installation with comfort). Didn't get around to testing wheezy's release UEFI behaviour but d-i beta4 had some troubles with bootloader installation as well.