installer not seeing partitions (solved)

[miks]

I used gparted in sidux or debian squeeze.  I dont have any ext4 partiions.
Here is a screenshot of gparted.

[fragadelic]

Strange.  I'm not about to partition any of my drives like that to test but I'll check and see what I can come up with.

[miks]

OK, let me know if there is anything can do.

[miks]

OK Frag, I figured it out........

I was doing something wrong.

I tried it on my old Athlon xp1800 box on a spare 5gb drive.  Made swap + ext3 partitions and still failed.  So I tried a different approach.  When the installer shows the drive, hda or sda, it appears to be highlighted.  So I just hit ok.  That is it.  Because I did not click on sda, it could not find the partitions, although to confuse things more, it did recognise the swap, so that is probably why I assumed that it had started to see sda ok.

So, it is my fault,     but it does highlight some shortcomings of remastersys.  As you wrote remastersys, you obviously know your way around it like the back of your hand.   My (constructive) criticism is that there are no error messages to let you know that you have made a wrong move, and the installer carries on regardless.  I suggest that the drive should not appear already highlighted if there is a need to click on it to highlight it.  Agreed, the pale blue (apparent) highlighting is different to the dark blue highlighting, but it is misleading.

So, I have installed on 2 machines now, and I like what I see.  Now I know what I am doing, I hope to have a lot of fun with it.  Well done, this has obviously taken a lot of work, and is a brilliant tool.
Cheers, Mike
 

[fragadelic]

Try it again on the one with all the partitions - I'm sure I fixed that issue.

I do plan on making the installer better but don't have the time right now.

[miks]

Try it again on the one with all the partitions - I'm sure I fixed that issue.

I did and it installed OK.  I have been playing with it and I must say, it is what I have been looking for for some time.  Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to be pure Lenny, with a great set of tools, back up and remastering facilities and a fast, simple installer. ( once us dimwits have figured out how to use it properly).  It has all the stuff that debian really needs but doesnt provide in a tidy package for the less geeky among us.

It is absolutely ideal for me to use for my 84 year old Dad, who refuses to use the latest sidux I installed for him, prefering to stick with the very out of date pclos minime I installed for him over 2 years ago, which will certainly break if I try to upgrade it.  I can install the necessary wifi stuff and Opera for him before I visit and should be able to leave him with a working system that he likes, without spending hours configuring it.

Thanks for a great system.....

[fragadelic]

Glad you like it.  You might actually find that his wifi stuff will work and will only need you to put in the specific config for his wireless network.

[miks]

Hi Frag, I have a remaster ready to install on my dads lappy, so will try installing it this week.  His dvd drive had problems reading the dvd last time  I tried (iso is too big for cd) so I was thinking of installing directly from a frugal install on a spare partition. I have tried to set up a frugal on my vaio at home but cant seem to get my usual "fromiso" grub boot stanza to work. Is it something to do with the use of initrd.gz rather than initrd.img?
Any hints on setting up a working frugal stanza would be appreciated.
Also, I was reading an interesting thread you wrote on using the installer to install directly from an existing install to a new hard drive, ( think it was on one of your testbed machines) but although I have searched the forum for some time, I cant seem to find it to read it again. Could you post a link please?
Thanks

[dzz]

cant seem to get my usual "fromiso" grub boot stanza to work

It won't with Debian's live-initramfs. You can extract the "live" directory containing the squash to a partition root though and point grub to it.

I battled that issue for some time because I needed a pendrive with a custom remaster, keeping the iso intact for future transfer.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=534887

has links to some grml patches to enable fromiso and findiso.  Manual editing of live-initramfs scripts was a challenging task. I got findiso to work but never fromiso.

If anyone else here does fromiso I would be interested to know how.

My next battle is how to get persistence working on a single fat partition but that's another subject.

[miks]

You can extract the "live" directory containing the squash to a partition root though and point grub to it.

Thanks dzz,  I copied the live directory to a spare partition (sda3) and tried the follwing stanza:

title rms RAM Session
kernel (hd0,2) /live/vmlinuz boot=/live/filesystem.squashfs toram splash
initrd (hd0,2) /live/initrd.gz

I adapted this from a toram ubuntu thread on linux questions but I get error 1 message.
I also tried boot=live but no go. 

I dont need to boot to ram but I cant find any other info on booting a squashfs in debian.  Can you see where I am going wrong?
Cheers, Mike

[dzz]

Not using LLD at the moment but this works for other debian remasters here . Responds MUCH faster than a cd especially if toram. The initrd and vmlinuz are in the disk2part8 root, squash is in disk2part8/live. In your case is (hd0,2) There is a post somewhere in this forum on "cheatcodes"

Code:

### dzcustombuild from squash
title dzcustombuild from squash
root (hd1,7)
kernel (hd1,7)/vmlinuz boot=live union=aufs quiet vga=791
initrd (hd1,7)/initrd.gz

[miks]

Code:

title rms from squash
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/vmlinuz boot=live union=aufs splash vga=791
initrd (hd0,2)/initrd.gz

Still get same error message.  Wondering if I am doing something wrong in the way I have arranged my files.

I have vmlinuz and initrd.gz in the root of sda3 which is an ext3 partition.  I have filesystem.squashfs in a directory called live which is in the root of sda3.

Is this correct or am I missing something?   

[miks]

Also, I was reading an interesting thread you wrote on using the installer to install directly from an existing install to a new hard drive, ( think it was on one of your testbed machines) but although I have searched the forum for some time, I cant seem to find it to read it again. Could you post a link please?
Thanks

I found it at last here:
http://geekconnection.org/remastersys/forums/index.php?topic=91.msg717#msg717

Under "testimonials"!  No wonder it was hard to track down.........