a...@his.com wrote: >Long before I joined this List, I purchased a DVD and a thumb device from >LinuxCollections. The DVD contained the first Jessie DVD, and, I'm guessing, >the thumb device contained the rest. > >I kept the same partitions that I had had on my old squeezy install. >the first was /boot, the fifth was /, the sixth was /usr, the seventh >was /var, the eighth was swap, the ninth was /tmp and the tenth was >/home. The sizes I kept from squeezy; all were overly generous(my HD >is one TB.) > >I reformatted them all with ext4 at first, then later with >ext3, which what my old system had. [ Sorry for the vague terminology, >I'm writing this on a loaner Windoze box many yards away from my >own machine and documentation. ]
OK, that's understandable. >The _many_ install attempts crashed at random points but after a while >they congregated when I tried to choose a kernel. After choosing a kernel >one must then choose the associated drivers. When exactly did the installer ask you to choose a kernel? Or do you mean after the installation had finished and rebooted? I'd *guess* the latter, but your later text doesn't tally with that. >This crashed almost inevitably, although once I got through to stage >where I received a black screen with the white text prompt 'grub>'. >This was before the kernel was booted, and I have no clue how to use >this, even if I once again get this far. If you're at a grub menu, then hitting "e" should give you the option to edit the selected boot option. I'd try doing that and remove the "quiet" kernel argument as a start in the hope that you might get some more useful diagnostics. I'm *guessing* where you've got to here, though. >I have tried choosing 'none' for a kernel. But then one must choose an >installer. I've tried choosing grub, even tried using the ancient LILO. >All produce red screens, indicating failures of one kind or other. And this is totally confusing, I'm afraid. If you could retry the installer and tell us exactly what the screen says when you choose "none", that would be helpful. >I have discovered the informative 'tty4' where the progress of the >installation is more copiously displayed. Yup, that's the syslog output. If you've got that far, you can use tty2 or tty3 to start a shell and play with the system, or from the installer menu you can even start a tiny built-in web server in the installer environment so that you can grab logfiles from another machine over the network. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "Further comment on how I feel about IBM will appear once I've worked out whether they're being malicious or incompetent. Capital letters are forecast." Matthew Garrett, http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjg59/30675.html