[Pkg-exppsy-maintainers] Trouble installing Debain (anything)

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

at first (I didn't see the author) I said -- WTF this guy wants from our
exppsy list -- some generic Debian troubleshooting? ;-) then I saw that
it is you

I got X61 (tablet) myself few months ago ;-) Vista was ruined completely
since you have to either resize it from within it (but then you can free
up only up to some % of space actually) or you need to do some other
trickery (grub4dos, etc) -- otherwise later on it wouldn't boot. Just
read elsewhere if you want to preserve your "lovely" vista

> my new laptop (an Thinkpad X61).  It has no cdrom drive so I'm using
> this unetbootin program to start a net install from within windows
> (Vista really does suck).  The problem is that the hard drive is not
> detected during the debian install and I can't do a thing past that.
just do boot from a flash drive. Use some latest snapshot of debian
installer... documentation has it
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apas02.html#howto-getting-images-usb
but I went without precompiled image... so I went through
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch04s04.html


I think from here
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/index

then we go from there to 
other images (netboot, usb stick, floppy, etc)
amd64
http://people.debian.org/~aba/d-i/images/daily/

hd-media
and get files
[   ] boot.img.gz             07-Jan-2008 04:12  17.8M  
[   ] vmlinuz                 07-Jan-2008 04:12   1.5M  
from
http://people.debian.org/~aba/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/

also we want to use initrd from netinstall since hd-media doesn't assume
mirror installation or smth like that so we take
http://people.debian.org/~aba/d-i/images/daily/netboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz

then we put all those on a stick and syslinux.cfg

I am not sure what kernel it runs now but I might have issues enabling
wireless right from the installer -- just stick to wired I guess...

hope this helps

> Searching the web finds no issues like this (except for one post that
> suggested changing SATA into Compatibility mode, which I did.)

> I really would like to run debian, but my main requirement is that I
> run linux, which I can't currently do.

> I realize there is probably not enough information, but do you have
> any thoughts or suggestions?  I have about one more hour before this
> laptop gets Ubuntu, which I hope does not happen.

installer of ubuntu is 99% rip off debian installer, but they also added
wireless drivers which might make your wireless work right of the
installer... besides that... it even crashed on me in wilder ways than
debian installer few times... IT would be great if you manage to setup
Debian laptop ;-)

-- 
Yaroslav Halchenko
Research Assistant, Psychology Department, Rutgers-Newark
Student  Ph.D. @ CS Dept. NJIT
Office: (973) 353-5440x263 | FWD: 82823 | Fax: (973) 353-1171
        101 Warren Str, Smith Hall, Rm 4-105, Newark NJ 07102
WWW:     http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik