Package: debian-installer Version: i386 netinst as of October 5, 2011 Severity: important Tags: d-i
Dear Maintainer, * What led up to the situation? I decided to install Debian on a new disk drive and preserve the Windows installation on the original drive. I downloaded the latest i386 netinst ISO image of Debian Installer, burned it on a DVD and booted off it. * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)? I chose the new drive for simple partitioning. I chose to install Grub2 in MBR of the original drive. * What was the outcome of this action? I did not see Windows as a boot option. (This took a worse turn when the udev in the initial RAM disk image loaded a kernel module "radeon" for my video card ATI Radeon HD 3600, apparently in an attempt to provide a frame buffer for the text mode, and the video card showed garbage. It took a while to add an option "blacklist=radeon" to the kernel command line at boot time and add a line "blacklist radeon" to a file in /etc/modprobe.d). * What outcome did you expect instead? I expected to see a boot option to start from a partition in the original disk drive. Here is how I worked around the issue. I booted off the netinst DVD into a rescue mode. Ran update-grub and it did not show the Windows partition of the original drive. Inspected the output of os-prober. I believe it did not show Windows either. I then ran fdisk -l and I think I saw my original disk drive with its Windows partition. After inspecting os-prober I figured it depended on the list of mounted partitions. I added the Windows partition to /etc/fstab, /dev/sda1 /c ntfs auto 0 0 Unfortunately, "mount /c" failed because the target root partition where I chrooted did not have modules of the rescue kernel. I cannot remember how I succeeded in mounting the partition before re-running update-grub. Perhaps, I returned or rebooted to the dialogs of the rescue mode of Debian Installer and chose to re-configure Grub2 in the dialogs. I could see my Windows partition of the original drive in the bootloader's list at boot time. I could successfully start Windows. Here is my opinion on a possible root cause. It seems that Debian Installer does not attempt to mount partitions on drives other than the one selected for partitioning. -- System Information: Debian Release: wheezy/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_CA.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org