Hi, i wrote: > > The messages quoted by Kent could well indicate that the "CD-ROM" was > > found
Curt wrote: > I was laboring under another erroneous impression for some reason, but > looking back at the OP he did say that the installer complained about > not being able to "read" the cdrom (not that there was none inserted). Possibly it was me who brought up the idea of "not found". That was because the started kernel needs to find the device with the ISO 9660 filesystem that contains the expected files outside the initrd. A good occasion for Linux not to like the USB stick after firmware and bootloader had no problem. But i began to doubt this theory when Kent (OP) pointed to the Askubuntu question as example of the messages he saw: https://askubuntu.com/questions/127398/usb-drive-install-of-ubuntu-12-04-server-fails-cant-find-components-from-cd-r > Of course there was never a cdrom to read [...] > I guess we know 'it' means the thumb drive > "There was an error reading data from the CD-ROM. [...]" Actually it should talk about the ISO 9660 filesystem of the installation medium. "CD-ROM" is sooo Y2K. Not modern any more and not yet retro. Saying "Please have all installation diskettes ready" - that would be stylish. Back to technical: It seems that a lower software layer bails out without specific error indication and a thus clueless upper layer tries to say something useful about this unspecific failure. Can it be that debian-installer should be more verbose ? For example with the description of its components ? https://packages.debian.org/en/stretch/anna says its purpose is to be not nearly apt, but to do nevertheless. > Apparently there is (or was) an option to check the integrity of the 'cdrom' > at that point (read failure) in the installer. I would love to believe this. But probably the best check is https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#verify on the system which copied the ISO image onto the installation medium. > Any gritty details would probably be in the logs. Where should the next victim of this problem look ? (It is not very rare, as the web tells me via google.) Have a nice day :) Thomas