On Sun 31 May 2015 at 13:56:30 -0700, Charles wrote: > Correct. Sorry, I'm a little frustrated.
Let's see what we can do to remove the frustration You are so kind <g>. > Two directions: > > 1) I've found lots of solutions regarding how to refer the install process > to > a URL (web server). This is a bit of an overkill. Fine. We'll agree with that. Ideally, in a home environment with few machines available and certainly not one to load a web server just for this. > 2) I've been told repeatedly that doing a dd copy to a USB stick gives one > the ability to create a writeable partition on the same USB stick, only to That is correct. > have such advice withdrawn when I point out that fdisk, gparted, and kparted > indicate that there are four partitions (fdisk) or no partitions (gparted and > kparted) on the USB thumb drive. Fdisk won't add a partition beyond > /dev/sdb4, and gparted and kparted wipe out the existing (dd copy) data when > they create a new partition. dd an i386 netinst image to a USB stick. Now do 'fdisk -l /dev/sdX' and post the output. 'X' can be found from the the last few lines of the output of the dmesg command. It might be a or b etc. Repeat for an amd64 netinst image and again post the output. I'll continue, but now I'm stupid. The earlier attempts have involved doing a dd of boot.img to the USB thumb drive, and then copying the installation ISO intact to that same drive. THAT'S the process that gives me the four partitions that look like gibberish. It was multiple efforts to get the ISO image onto a partition for read/write access. This one may/may not look better, but I will comply. The results from fdisk -l /dev/sdb after: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4M count=60 && sync dd if=debian-7.8.0-[arch]-netinst.iso && sync for both a i386 and amd64 netinst image, correct? for an i386 netinst ISO: Disk /dev/sdb: 15.5 GB, 15502147584 bytes 64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 14784 cylinders, total 30277632 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x178e0fca Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 64 567295 283616 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS For an amd64 netinst ISO: Disk /dev/sdb: 15.5 GB, 15502147584 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1884 cylinders, total 30277632 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x42a6671b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 0 454655 227328 0 Empty /dev/sdb2 3440 4335 448 ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32) Both look somewhat odd, but not so bad. I'd prefer using the amd64 image, if it gets that far. The Dells are all 64- bit.
