Version: daily build

Severity: grave


I'm trying to install Debian from the daily netinstall (17 May 2010) with an
USB on a Sony Vaio [1] and the installer hangs when scanning hard drives for
an installer ISO image.

It jumps directly to 95% and doesn't move from there. All I can see in the
screen is "Detecting hardware, please wait..."



[1] http://www.sony.es/product/vn-w-series/vpcw12j1e-w (I haven't been able
to find it in English, sorry)

severity 582044 normal
thanks

Quoting Jon Ander Peñalba (jonan.debian@gmail.com):


Have you tried switching to another console (Alt+F4)? There should be
some debugging output there.

Can you post the URL from where you got the netinst ISO image?

This is some of the info I get in the console (hope it's enough):

main-menu: INFO: Menu item 'iso-scan' selected
main-menu: INFO: Falling back to the package description for
loop-modules-2.6.32-3-486-di
main-menu: INFO: Falling back to the package description for
loop-modules-2.6.32-3-486-di
hw-detect: ISA bus detected; loading module 'idle-generic'
hw-detect: insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-3-486/kernel/drivers/ide/ide-core.ko
kernel: Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver

(then this message repeated a few times)
kernel: usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2

(then the error)
kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 0

I downloaded the ISO image from here [1] and the boot.img.gz from here [2].

[1]
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/
[2] http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/

I have the same issue when trying to install squeeze/testing/03-July-2010
in a Xen HVM domU running on a stable/lenny Xen dom0. I read a few reports of
seeing this problem on low memory systems but doubled the VM's RAM from
128MB to 256MB with no effect.

The disk is detected, so I'm a bit puzzled. ALT-F4 shows:

	13:26:47 kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
	13:26:47 kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
	13:26:47 kernel: ide-gd driver 1.18
	13:26:47 kernel: hda: max request size: 512KiB
	13:26:47 kernel: hda: 25165824 sectors (12884MB) w/256KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63
	13:26:47 kernel: hda: cache flushes supported
	13:26:47 kernel:  hda: unknown parititon table
	13:32:45 hw-detect: ISA bus detected: loading module 'ide-generic'
	13:32:45 hw-detect: insmod /lib/modules/2.6.30-2-486/kernel/drivers/ide/ide-generic.ko
	13:32:45 kernel: ide_generic: please use "probe_mask=0x3f" module parameter for probing all legact ISA IDE ports
	13:32:47 kernel: check-missing-firmware: no missing firmware in /dev/.udev/firmware-missing

Shortly after that ALT-F1 goes blue for a bit and then appears:

	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.

I assume that this is a hw-detect issue, because the 'kernel:' lines
above indicate that the kernel has no problem detecting the hardware
and sfdisk has no problem partitioning. (fdisk currently has a library
problem, so that's why i tested with sfdisk, which is also available
from the shells on ALT-F2/F3).

I can easily repeat my test if something new arrives in testing, I
could also drop a new deb/udeb/whatever into my testing mirror and
try installing from that if that would help.

HTH

Alexis

Hi,

I've seen this same problem in a squeeze domU running on XenServer.  The
"Detecting disks and all other hardware" screen takes about 15 minutes to
complete.  Then the "[!] Detect disks" screen appears and prompts the user to
select a driver.

I initially chose "xen-blkfront" but this had no effect apart from to return me
to the same screen.  However, when I selected "continue with no disk drive" the
installation completed successfully and squeeze was installed to /dev/xvda (the
paravirtualized block device).

It seems like hw-detect does not recognise /dev/xvd* as a valid block device to
which Debian can be installed, but the rest of debian-installer has no problem
with it!

I was using the following images:
dists/squeeze/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/xen/{vmlinuz,initrd.gz}
from http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/

TIA for any suggestions!

Regards,

Alex

[Alex Zeffertt]

This sound very much like the udev version skew reported in #586404.
This causes every call to 'udevadm settle' to take 3 minutes.
Solution unknown, but a workaround is to kill and start udevd using
the shell in tty2.

Perhaps this is related to the udev version skew too?

Happy hacking,

2010/5/17 Jon Ander Peñalba <jonan.debian@gmail.com>
I've tried to install Debian again on this netbook and the problem persists.
I think it might be due to the fact that the installer is looking for a
CD-ROM drive an this netbook doesn't have one, but it's just a wild guess.