Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?

Updating from Debian 8 to Debian 12 from an USB stick.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

Ineffective: Tried disconnecting external disks & USB storage HUB, and switching SATA setting from AHCI to IDE in BIOS.
Also tried expert mode & text mode.

   * What was the outcome of this action?

Debian Installer is stuck on Detect Disks.
Switching to a console and running ps shows that a parted_devices process is in D state.

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

parted_devices should only take a few seconds and Debian Installer should continue to the partionning step.

Note: I'm reporting from another computer.
System information from the old OS is irrelevant anyway as the computer is booted on the Debian 12 installer image when the problem occurs.

Hi,

Olivier F. R. Dierick <o.dierick@piezo-forte.be> (2023-11-16):

Not being able to install doesn't “break the whole system”. This is a
showstopper in the installation process in your case indeed, but that's
not what this severity is for.

Maybe check the image was correctly written on your USB stick? A number
of weird issues like that one are linked to hardware faults or similar
issues.

Anything in dmesg or /var/log/syslog?

It might be interesting to see what happens with 12.0 images (in case
something interesting happened in the kernel, but such a hard failure
seems rather strange), and maybe try your luck with some Debian Live
image?


Cheers,