Installing Debian Lenny from a USB stick with Windows.
by Mike
I recently purchased an Acer Aspire REVO for the purposes of a Development server that I can keep running 24/7 without the fear of racking up electricity bills. The trouble is, it has no cd-rom, so I set about looking to install from a USB disk.
After a bit of googling, it wasn’t quite obvoius how to achieve this, so here is what I ended up with.
You’ll need a USB disk, formatted as FAT32 - for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume the usb disk is mounted on G:
First of all you’ll need dd for windows.
Then boot.img.gz from here
Extract boot.img.gz to the same place you put dd (I stuck it in c:/) and simply run:
dd.exe if=boot.img of=\\.\g: bs=1M
Once this is completed, remove the disk and re-insert it to fresh the filesystem, upon opening it up you’ll find all the necessary files needed to boot.
The final step is to add a disk image to install from, I used the NetInst ISO - simply drop it into the root of the usb disk.
That’s it, boot the USB disk
Comments
Interesting Mike. unetbootin can be useful here too, but i mainly was interested in the matter of Lenny on the Revo. What are you using it for and how is it going?
It’s funny that you mention unetboot because I found it afterwards, when searching for Ubuntu usb install (I stuck with debian).
I work in web development, and both my Employer and Clients need to be able to access development sites all the time, so I’m moving from a VM to this for my dev server, mainly for power reasons, it supposedly uses around 10W idle, and 25-30W under full load.
I haven’t got much further than getting it running with the usual Apache,PHP,MySQL, as I had a few issues with the ION chipset’s ethernet controller not starting. Its all running fine now, I shall probably report back on how I get on once I’ve had a bit more experience with it.
That’s great Mike. I’ll bookmark this page
What bios do we have here Mike? Does it support USB stick boot?
I’ve forgotten already, it’s a Custom something, I know it is the same as my Abit board.
It does support USB and Network booting, although it took me a little while to realise I had to disable the “Revo Boot” option.
Hi again,
Well I got the netinst installed… I plugged in a D-Link DUB-E100 USB Ethernet, without much hope of it working, and the netinst detected it and connected onto my network! Brilliant!
Unfortunately I still couldn’t get the onboard LAN to work. It shows as MCP79, but seems to be turned off.
The video driver is also terrible and refuses to let me drop the resolution down to a readable size, but that’s not really a problem as when I do get this working, it’s not going to be running Gnome or X.
Having drawn a blank on the LAN, I installed (forgive my language) Vista to test it, and the LAN works, although all the ZIP files of drivers on the Acer site seem to be corrupt! Lovely! Luckily Windows update found some drivers. Curiously the D-Link also works in Vista, but I have to manually install drivers for it… So Debian actually supports it better! Hehe
At least I know the LAN port actually works, so I assume I am suffering the same “off” port that you mentioned. You wouldn’t care to share how to turn it on again would you?
Cheers
I think I disabled it in the BIOS, tried booting, and then re-enabled and it worked. There may have been a few other steps, but I’m sure whatever I did was fairly obvious in the BIOS.