Dear Maintainer,

The Debian 12 installer (any minor version) fails to install on HyperV
on Windows Server 2008 R2. For demonstration purposes, I am using the
debian-12.6.0-amd64-netinst ISO installer.

Debian 12 installs on HyperV in Windows Server 2019, and Debian 11 (any
version) also installs successfully in HyperV on Windows Server 2008 R2.
Therefore, the issue seems to be limited to a regression within the
Debian 12 installer itself.

Issues are as follows:

* Detect network hardware step fails with the default network adapter
  in HyperV. "No Ethernet card was detected. If you know the name of
  the driver needed by your Ethernet card, you can select from the list".
  No selection made causes it to work, the installer keeps cycling
  back to this step.
* Removing the Network Adapter and adding a Legacy Network Adapter
  allows the network adapter to be detected successfully. However,
  a similar failure now occurs at "Detect disks". "No disk drive was
  detected. If you know the name of the driver needed by your disk drive,
  you can select it from the list..."

Hi,

and thanks for your report.

InterLinked <debian@phreaknet.org> (2024-12-16):

Do you happen to know the names of the Linux kernel modules that'd be
required to support those devices? You could try and run a Debian Live
image to check whether kernel support is missing entirely (from the
Linux kernel packages) or “just” from within the installer.


Cheers,

InterLinked <debian@phreaknet.org> (2024-12-17):

Please share the output of `lsmod` from Debian Live, with the default
(non-legacy) network adapter. `dmesg` might be helpful too.

Thanks already!


Cheers,

Windows Server 2008 R2 is EOL since a few years.

Bastian

[...]

Note that this hypervisor has been completely unsupported by MS for
nearly 5 years:
<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/hyperv-server-2008-r2>.

Most likely the Hyper-V drivers in Linux no longer support it.  I don't
think this is worth spending time on.

Ben.