Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?

I have installed Debian using both/either Debian CD and/or Debian Live Disk
on a computer with 5-bay CD-ROMs

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

Just try to use debian normal installer, or the Speech Synthesis part!

   * What outcome did you expect instead?


I have noticed that if it is not in the first bay, the installer fails,
for example, I put Debian 13 in the second bay and another data disk in
the first bay, the installer fails.

Hi Itamar,

When you say "fails", that's a little vague. What exactly happens,
please? For example: does it fail to boot altogether, or does it fail
to do something later?

Debian just report that there is no modules loaded and al the rest of steps
of installer just fails

i removed all the disk over the other trays and repeat and installers
works..
then move the debian installer CD to the first tray and now it works no
matter there are other disks on the others trays

Thanks for your effors and fast response.. i have two other bugs i am
helping my blind eye friend that uses debian.

Hi,

i wonder (with my libburn hat on) what "5-bay CD-ROMs" means.
Searching the web yields no conclusive matches.

Is it a single device ?
If so: what maker and model ? How is it attached to the computer ?
(Built-in SATA, external USB, ...)

Or do you mean 5 CD-ROM drives in 5 bays of the computer casing ?


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

It's 5 CDROM drives in 5 bays, meaning all the SATA ports on the
motherboard, the hard drive is a old M2 drive not a modern M2 PCIe sorry
for my lack of information, I'm not an expert and my English isn't the best.

I also want to explain my process, I always have in the bays an emergency
Debian Live disk, an emergency Alpine disk, one of the current installation
disk and one of what I want to test which was Debian 13 in this case.

I've now noticed that this error only occurs if there are multiple Debian
disks in the bays at the same time. I just put other non-Debian disks and
they worked perfectly.

I think that while it's not a bug, this information should be included in
the manual and release notes.

Cheeers

Hi,

Itamar Perdomo:

So the hardware situation is oppulent but not exotic.

This sounds like GRUB or the debian-installer picks the wrong Debian CD
in the course of booting Linux or running debian-installer.

I idimly remember that there are searches for the /.disk directory of
media.

https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=package%3Adebian-installer+\.disk
yields a GRUB configuration snippet in
https://codesearch.debian.net/show?file=debian-installer_20250803%2fbuild%2futil%2fefi-image&line=131#L131

  search --file --set=root /.disk/info

I expect that both involved Debian CDs have such a directory.


In an earlier mail of yours i read:

Above GRUB command might have caused a jump from the right EFI system
partition (i.e. file /boot/grub/efi.img in the ISO) into the wrong
ISO 9660 filesystem with the further equipment of GRUB and Debian.
I'm not sure whether this can cause the symptoms you experience.

Or other parts of the debian-installer might rely on similar searches.

Hopefully Steve McIntyre will have clearer ideas what could possibly go
wrong with two differing bootable Debian CDs.

You could make an experiment in the meantime and try whether it helps
to swap the two Debian CDs between the two drives.
(Regrettably the ever changing /dev/sr numbering of multiple drives in
the Linux kernel could obscure the effect of swapping after GRUB did
its job. But at least during GRUB's reign it could be deterministic.
Maybe the effect is random enough to appear only in 50 % of boot
attempts.)


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

Hi, sorry for send the email so abruptly but it seems there is some bounces around my gmail account and i cannot understand why i cannot send mails to debian bug traking system..
i try to clarify and provide some logs cos i found some bugs in debian installerand this about several disk (in my case only two) is one
yes because that:
The debian installer tries to find a suitable disk, but only in the case of itamar it found a debian disk but does not check if there is another more suitable to the right installer version
Then steps never reach the modules loading, cos the installer finds a debian disk that does not match to the expected, that is why we got:
From there installation start to fails and never continue in expertmode.. in normal mode is also the same

Please, forgive me if it is not relevant, but even regular (not related
to installer) grub builds prefer to look for ".disk/info" and
".disk/mini-info"

     if [ -z "\$prefix" -o ! -e "\$prefix" ]; then
         if ! search --file --set=root /.disk/info; then
             search --file --set=root /.disk/mini-info
         fi
         set prefix=(\$root)/boot/grub
     fi

and tries the directory with the loaded .efi file after that:

     source \$cmdpath/grub.cfg

<https://sources.debian.org/src/grub2/2.12-9/debian/build-efi-images#L62>

I expect that it affects at least the case with custom GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR
in /etc/default/grub, so .efi files are installed into a directory other
than compiled-in path EFI/debian, and grub.cfg from some other disk with
.disk/info may be loaded instead.

$cmdpath was added by a patch for grub-2.12 and it was not available in
grub-2.06 (bookworm).

Sorry, I did not reported it as grub bug a year ago when I noticed it
during discussion on debian-user.