problem with DVD installation

[Gianmarco]

hello.

good day to you and thank you to read my email.

i downloaded the whole debian dvd set to install on an amd64 pc. up to
debian jessie the installing procedure by DVD always been perfectly
successful.

in the case of debian 11.2 no computer, not even the most recent one, can
start with the installation directly from the 1st DVD. obviously the bios
has been set to boot from DVD, in all cases and devices that I have tried.

I ask the favor of giving me some directives, because I notice that the
usual installation procedure from DVD seems to no longer work with any PC
(not even recent), no burner. I also checked the burning procedure but this
is always successful.

there is probably something new that completely escapes me: could you help
me please?

thank you in advance.

Gianmarco

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Post by Gianmarco
in the case of debian 11.2 no computer, not even the most recent one, can
start with the installation directly from the 1st DVD.

Well, at least for me with a halfways modern EFI it boots to some Debian
software.

- What kind of firmware did you try ? What mainboards or laptop models ?
- Is always the same DVD drive used for the installation attempt ?
(E.g. because is it attached via USB.)
- How far does the DVD boot for you ? Do you see indications that GRUB
or ISOLINUX (in case of legacy BIOS) was started ?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
What i tested:

I downloaded

https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/11.2.0/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-11.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

verified its SHA256
022370f066bc91b2cdac3837ff5fa9f3822c5afb2fc34f68084416079fe5a408
and burnt it onto a DVD+RW

xorriso -as cdrecord dev=/dev/sr5 -v -eject fs=32m debian-11.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

Then i put the ISO into a Xeon machine with an ASUS board of 2020.
The EFI firmware offers me in its boot menu the model name of the DVD drive
for booting. I double click (it's that kind of EFI with icons and animated
CPU fans) and quite immediately see the word "GRUB" on the screen.
Then a GRUB menu appears which offers me to install. I rather choose
Advanced Options and Rescue Mode. All seems well until i want to go
back to choose another country.
It begins to talk about "Installation" which i don't want. So i press
the hardware Reset button and rather check whether my Debian on that
machine is still operational. It is. Still with fvwm. What a relief.


Have a nice dyay :)

Thomas

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

maybe you are telling me that i have to use grub to start the DVD ?

No. GRUB is the bootloader in the ISO which gets started by EFI if it
is not in legacy emulation mode and thus would start the ISOLINUX bootloader
which is in the ISO too.

- I set the bios with the boot from DVD.

I assume that the newer machine has EFI as firmware.
So it offers the DVD to you in its boot menue ?

In my ASUS machine's EFI i then double click the item and GRUB gets started
by the EFI firmware.

- the system went straight into the pre-installed OS boot.

It shouldn't do this.
If it offers the DVD as boot opportunity then it should start one of the
bootloader images which are mentioned in the El Torito catalog of the ISO.

If the firmware believes to be a legacy BIOS (or emulates it) then it
should start the ISOLINUX boot program.
If it believes to be native EFI, then it should look into the boot image
for EFI, which is actually a FAT filesystem. In that filesystem it will
find /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI which it then will run.
Both boot loaders will then present their boot menus which bring you
to the first Linux kernel and the installation software.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are you sure older ISOs boot better on your machines ?
You mentioned Jessie.
So does the following small (251 MiB) ISO here work better ?

https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/8.11.1/amd64/iso-cd/debian-8.11.1-amd64-netinst.iso

You can put it on DVD, although it's a CD sized ISO.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Post by Thomas Schmitt
So does the following small (251 MiB) ISO here work better ?
 https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/8.11.1/amd64/iso-cd/debian-8.11.1-amd64-netinst.iso

i have already installed the jessie version of linux some years ago in one
of the pc where im try now to install 11.2.
[...]
but some days ago i tried to install debian jessie newly in the same pc and
the installation was very good.

What ISO exactly did you use ?

By what program did you put it on the DVD ?
Please describe either command line options or the GUI menu actions which
you selected.

the bios here is very simple.

So it did not actively offer you the DVD but rather you told it to prefer
DVD over hard disk ?

Since you say it's old BIOS, does this BIOS-only ISO boot:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-mac-11.3.0-amd64-netinst.iso

(The name "mac" is misleading and refers to a family of Apple computers
which boot by BIOS but refuse if the EFI equipment is advertised.)


The reason for my questions is to find out what works and what does not.
There were some changes between Debian 8 and 11. But the boot lures, which
lead the firmware to the boot images, have not changed.
So your report is quite a riddle, given that nobody else seems to have
experienced a similar refusal of multiple machines.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Post by Thomas Schmitt
What ISO exactly did you use ?

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/source/iso-dvd/

That's 11.3.0 meanwhile. But as you report to have used 11.2, i assume that
it is the same ISO as i downloaded from the archives and tested a few hours
ago.

I used brasero, for example.
I selected: burn ISO image.

That's the correct choice.

If you still have the 11.2 DVD:
What do you get from

dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 count=1903144 | sha256sum

I get

022370f066bc91b2cdac3837ff5fa9f3822c5afb2fc34f68084416079fe5a408 -

as with debian-11.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso from which i got the count of
1903144 blocks (dividing 3897638912 bytes by block size 2048).

Post by Thomas Schmitt
So it did not actively offer you the DVD but rather you told it to prefer
DVD over hard disk ?

yes: what you wrote is right.

All in all this looks like the DVD drive does not tell the BIOS that a
medium is loaded or that the BIOS does not recognize the El Torito boot
record and the boot catalog on the medium.
(But exactly this stuff has not changed between Debian 8 and 11.)

Insofar it would be very interesting to see what above dd | sha256sum
yields.


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

-> I have tried with: 10.3, 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3.
[...]
1903144+0 record in
1903144+0 record out
3897638912 byte (3,9 GB) copied, 260,578 s, 15,0 MB/s
d1fc0ddc81d980b9eddc9d110344bcf17a6cbd5750e147112ccc23bef4d61a8a  -

The DVD is readable at least as far it is needed for the BIOS to find
the EL Torito boot record, the catalog, and the boot images.
But the SHA256 does not match the one of
https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/11.2.0/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-11.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

Checking the DVD-1 of 10.3, 11.1, 11.3 would need other count= arguments
for dd. They would have to be derived from their image sizes or from
inspecting the DVDs.
See below.

I just wanted to tell you that with a 2021-machine, of a friend of mine,
we tried to download the ISO file (DVD-1) from this 2021-machine, always
burn it in his 2021-machine (windows-OS) and we always tried to launch the
installation from the same machine. the result was for me unexpectedly the
same as all the other tests I performed.

I still believe that the DVDs are somehow bad.

Please inspect those which you still have by:

xorriso -indev /dev/sr0 -toc -report_el_torito plain

and report the resulting information lines.

With the DVD+RW to which i burnt debian-11.2.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso i get:

xorriso : NOTE : Loading ISO image tree from LBA 0
xorriso : UPDATE : 80 nodes read in 1 seconds
...
xorriso : UPDATE : 9791 nodes read in 8 seconds
xorriso : NOTE : Detected El-Torito boot information which currently is set to be discarded
Drive current: -indev '/dev/sr0'
Media current: DVD+RW
Media status : is written , is appendable
Boot record : El Torito , MBR isohybrid cyl-align-on GPT APM
Media summary: 1 session, 1903144 data blocks, 3717m data, 766m free
Volume id : 'Debian 11.2.0 amd64 1'
Drive current: -indev '/dev/sr0'
Drive access : exclusive:unrestricted
Drive type : vendor 'HL-DT-ST' product 'BDDVDRW GGC-H20L' revision '1.03'
Drive id : '... nobody needs to know ...'
Media current: DVD+RW
Media product: MBIPG101/W04/48 , Moser Baer India Limited
Media status : is written , is appendable
Media blocks : 1903168 readable , 391936 writable , 2295104 overall
Boot record : El Torito , MBR isohybrid cyl-align-on GPT APM
Boot catalog : '/isolinux/boot.cat'
Boot image : '/isolinux/isolinux.bin' , boot_info_table=on
Boot image : '/boot/grub/efi.img' , platform_id=0xEF
ISO offers : Rock_Ridge Joliet
ISO loaded : Rock_Ridge
TOC layout : Idx , sbsector , Size , Volume Id
ISO session : 1 , 0 , 1903144s , Debian 11.2.0 amd64 1
Media summary: 1 session, 1903144 data blocks, 3717m data, 766m free
Media nwa : 1903168s
El Torito catalog : 5946 1
El Torito cat path : /isolinux/boot.cat
El Torito images : N Pltf B Emul Ld_seg Hdpt Ldsiz LBA
El Torito boot img : 1 BIOS y none 0x0000 0x00 4 7243
El Torito boot img : 2 UEFI y none 0x0000 0x00 5184 5947
El Torito img path : 1 /isolinux/isolinux.bin
El Torito img opts : 1 boot-info-table isohybrid-suitable
El Torito img path : 2 /boot/grub/efi.img

The size to be used with dd's count= is given in the lines

TOC layout : Idx , sbsector , Size , Volume Id
ISO session : 1 , 0 , 1903144s , Debian 11.2.0 amd64 1
Media summary: 1 session, 1903144 data blocks, 3717m data, 766m free

Other ISOs will show different numbers than 1903144.

Older xorriso versions might omit some of the shown lines. But the
assessment of node numbers (files and directories), of ISO session size,
of volume id, and of El Torito boot images is supposed to be the same as
in my above example.

You will probably get other info in these lines:

Media current: DVD+RW
Media product: MBIPG101/W04/48 , Moser Baer India Limited

It will be interesting to see what DVD type from which manufacturer you
used.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry for my lack of more particular ideas about what goes wrong.
The fact that the other subscribers to this mailing list are not offering
own ideas might mean that they currently have none.

To the bystanders:
A test with an old BIOS machine and a Debian 11.3 DVD-1 would nevertheless
be helpful. I can currently only test the EFI boot path.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

To get you going with Debian 11:

Would a USB stick of at least 4 GB capacity be available for being completely
overwritten ?

If so, i propose (with the usual warnings not to overwrite your hard disk
if it happens to be /dev/sdc):

# Make a backup of the complete USB stick which i assume to be /dev/sdc
usb_stick_dev=/dev/sdc
usb_stick_backup="$HOME"/usb_stick_backup.gz
dd if="$usb_stick_dev" bs=1M | gzip > "$usb_stick_backup"

# Copy ISO image to the stick (i assume 11.3 here, because it is the
# version that is currently advised for Debian installations)
dd if=debian-11.3.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso of="$usb_stick_dev" bs=1M ; sync

The last step is the risky one.
Check twice whether /dev/sdc is correct or use a safer method like the
one described in
https://wiki.debian.org/XorrisoDdTarget#Identify_the_device_by_plugging_and_copy_if_it_looks_safe_enough

Try to convince your machines' firmwares to boot from that USB stick.
The ISOs contain a bootable MBR for BIOS and an EFI system partiton.
So they should boot from the USB stick and lead to the same installer
software as does the DVD.

If you later want to get back your USB stick's old content and partitioning,
perform this (again risky) dd run:

# Restore backup
usb_stick_dev=/dev/sdc
usb_stick_backup="$HOME"/usb_stick_backup.gz
gunzip < "$usb_stick_backup" | dd of="$usb_stick_dev" bs=1M


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

[J.A. Bezemer]

Post by Thomas Schmitt

-> I have tried with: 10.3, 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3.

[...]

Post by Thomas Schmitt
Sorry for my lack of more particular ideas about what goes wrong.
The fact that the other subscribers to this mailing list are not offering
own ideas might mean that they currently have none.
A test with an old BIOS machine and a Debian 11.3 DVD-1 would nevertheless
be helpful. I can currently only test the EFI boot path.

Just tested firmware-11.3.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso on a J1900 system with SATA
DVD drive. Boots fine into isolinux in BIOS mode, and into grub in EFI
mode. So that would rule out any big problems with the iso.

Some more things that you might check:

- Disable any "Secure boot" or "Verified boot" functionality.

- An EFI system might not boot into BIOS mode unless some "Compatibility
mode" ("CSM") has been enabled.

- There are some 64-bit systems where EFI runs in 32-bit mode. To get
these booted into 64-bit installer, you need the multi-arch iso from here:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/multi-arch/iso-cd/debian-11.3.0-amd64-i386-netinst.iso

This is a CD-sized iso with minimal installable software. Once the
installer has started, you can put in an amd64 DVD to install software
from.

- Maybe your system tries to be smart and refuses to boot when a DVD
appears to be a harddisk instead. You could try clearing the first 512
bytes of the iso file ("partition table") and write a new DVD with that.

Good luck!

Best regards,
Anne Bezemer

[J.A. Bezemer]

Hi Gianmarco,

Dear Anne.
through the CD you listed to me, and the net, i got my debian 11.3. its
good.

Excellent, so the multi-arch netinst CD is booting properly into the
installer. Now you're trying to do a next step.

but i wanted to try again some way to get my debian directly by the 1st DVD.
through USB i got the same problem as the DVD, just the same.
so i tried inserting the CD and then replacing it with the DVD.......
and you wrote: "Once the installer has started, you can put in an amd64
DVD to install software
from."
error: file '/install.amd/vmlinuz' not found
error: you need to load th kernel first

This is expected; indeed you swapped too early.

so, i tried to continue with the CD again, inserting the DVD after the next
step, but during the phase "detecting hardware to find installation media"
a problem reading data was showed.

Okay, this should probably have worked, but I might have remembered
incorrectly.

When you leave the CD inserted, and the installer detects and scans it,
will that work properly? Now right after that, the installer should ask
you if you have another disc to scan. At that question, you can take out
the CD, insert the DVD, and *then* choose Yes (if I remember the sequence
correctly). This way, the installer will register both the CD and the DVD,
and can install software from both of them.

When the CD is scanned properly using this process, but the DVD fails,
then your DVD is bad. Maybe the DVD has bad data on it (corrupted
download), or the DVD burner is bad, or the DVD reader is bad. Then it's
easiest to just forget about the DVD, and only use the CD, and have the
rest of software downloaded from the internet by the installer. The
installer will prompt you for network settings and a software download
location ("mirror") for that purpose.

i would like to try clearing the first 512 bytes of the iso file, but i
dont know the way to do that.

Now that you can start the installer from CD, you can forget about the
first 512 bytes. It will not change detection of the DVD by the installer
in any way.

Best regards,
Anne Bezemer

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

When the CD is scanned properly using this process, but the DVD fails, then
your DVD is bad. Maybe the DVD has bad data on it (corrupted download), or
the DVD burner is bad, or the DVD reader is bad.

I agree in principle. But the particular reason for the firmware's refusal
to consider booting the DVD should be found out.

So i would still be interested in seeing the output of

xorriso -indev /dev/sr0 -toc -report_el_torito plain

while the DVD is in the drive, and of

xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -list_profiles

regardless whether the medium is loaded or not.
(If there is more than one optical drive, the address might be /dev/sr1 or
/dev/sr2.)


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

Post by Thomas Schmitt
Hi,

When the CD is scanned properly using this process, but the DVD fails, then
your DVD is bad. Maybe the DVD has bad data on it (corrupted download), or
the DVD burner is bad, or the DVD reader is bad.

I agree in principle. But the particular reason for the firmware's refusal
to consider booting the DVD should be found out.
So i would still be interested in seeing the output of
xorriso -indev /dev/sr0 -toc -report_el_torito plain
while the DVD is in the drive, and of
xorriso -outdev /dev/sr0 -list_profiles
regardless whether the medium is loaded or not.
(If there is more than one optical drive, the address might be /dev/sr1 or
/dev/sr2.)
Have a nice day :)
Thomas

If this is one of the strange machines with 32 bit UEFI firmware and a 64 bit
processor - Intel Bay Trail laptop, for example - then the standard installers
have problems - as outlined - and you'd need to find the multi-arch DVD to
install from.

If you use the multi-arch netinst to isntall a minimal Debian, you can always then use 64 bit DVDs to add packages with apt-cdrom.

Hope this helps, all the very best,

Andy Cater